Artists Anonymous: GUARD 1, 2008, Afterimage, 140 cm x100 cm / Courtesy White Square Gallery, Berlin
With the exhibition RAPTURE - until December 12th - in the new rooms of the White Square Gallery in Berlin, ARTIST ANONYMOUS strike a balance of their art and life thus far, to which they gave a shape over the last several years. Not only do they recall their former statements on the essential questions of the present, but they give an interested audience an idea of their further development.
An important hint is given through the exhibitions title, RAPTURE, which in this case stands less for theme, then more for existence which includes a modern, active position in life. One could describe this condition as “relaxed tension”, that is what the artists plead for. Not to think the group has run out of ideas, with which they could make us reflect. There are still plenty. What is being thematized and lived here, is just a shift of ones own perspective, which gradually happens as one evolves, as a human and as an artist.
As visitors of this exhibition we are invited to immediately share the artists’ experience. However this artistic event does not tolerate visitors; it demands actors. This time there are no further protagonists in the world of Artists Anonymous; except for us. The world that we access with Rapture is a snoozy, dawning enchanted world, which can only be aroused through and with us. Our tension-filled game starts with a “forest between the world”, which catches and sends us on an odyssey of sense perception throughout various places of this here created utopia.
Our senses are faced with an acid test: a tide of sigma – strange and familiar at once – gushes on us from every side, like from a horn of plenty. We now need to challenge this. An indication of symbols – traces and ciphers of ancient and modern cultures – helps us orient and paves the way to the “tree of knowledge”, where our “odyssey of senses” ends.§ This end however already holds a new beginning – for those at least, who succumbed to the magic of this hallucinating parallel world, a world in which reality and fantasy, myth and science, seriousness and game, art and life, are unified into a mystery, created by the artists, who prove to be demiurges.
The way ARTISTS ANONYMOUS work is an artistic and scientific at the same time. The works are transformed through a reversal process that blends Painting, Photography and Installation. The inversion process is as labour intensive as the concept itself. They photograph their work to create its positive inverse, what they term an "after-image". The finished result is painted, and from this a negative photograph is produced with a pinhole camera.
