Michael van Ofen

• German, Softcover
• 32 pages
• 30 x 23 cm
• 9783865883452
• Published by Sies + Höke, 2007

Michael van Ofen was published on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition at Sies + Höke in 2007.

Michael van Ofen's paintings take off precisely from a point where painting suffered one of its greatest historical defeats. His inspiration - or at least his primary incentive - is 19th-century genre painting, a moment when painting was forced to compete with the invention of photography, and then soon afterward with Modernism and modernistic experimentation.

He mines the defeat of painting, finding within it what he has described as the ideal "found object": the perfect source material. His conscious distancing, even dismissal of this source material, his treatment of it as a found object, is about as far as one can get from our contemporary, fetishistic conception of the painterly touch.

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