As a Jew, seeing the imagery of trucks dumping out piles of naked and emaciated bodies and mass graves full of corpses during the holocaust had a deep impact on me as a child. Drawings of piles of bodies have been a theme in my work for a long time, especially since I began to create the body of drawings that I call “Mother Earth is a Dirty Whore”, a body of work inspired by the critical insights of Goya’s Caprichos and the New Objectivity from the fall of the Weimar Republic as well as the Dutch and Flemish moralistic works.
I also included a drawing of Waldo from the beloved series of books “Where’s Waldo” into one of the drawings of this series as joke and a nod to the fact that artists like Hieronymus Bosch were the forefathers of the wimmerlbilderbuch. This might be the most difficult “Where’s Waldo” challenge ever.
By making the bodies cover the entire image, removing all scenery and adding humans walking on each other. the imagery takes on new meaning and a new visual format that is different from my previous drawings as there is generally less of a strong compositional direction in which the drawing leads the viewers eyes. It becomes almost like a pattern for a piece of fabric.
The idea of humans walking on each other inspires me to think of the adage that we “stand on the shoulders of those that went before us” through their accomplishments and ironically it also reminds how humans sometimes “walk all over” other people and use each other as “stepping stones” or as rungs on the “ladder of success” to get to where they want to be. I like the idea that it’s hard to tell if the people in the drawing simply have their eyes closed because they are blinking or unconscious or if they are dead, an idea that I’ve played with before in the past.
The pure massiveness of the crowd as well as the chaos in their arrangement makes me think of both the dangers of overpopulation (such as pandemics and environmental damage) as well as the simple frustrations and other problems that humans cause each other and the disorder and chaos make me think about how many problems on earth are largely a result of humans simply failing to coordinate things together well because of ineptitude and selfishness. For that reason, I don’t think of these drawings as a departure from my “Mother Earth is a Dirty Whore” series but simply a subcategory within it.
When I ruminate on this work, I also think about how the images are an expression of the feelings of social anxiety and claustrophobia that I sometimes feel when I’m around other humans. It fascinates me how frustrating it can be to be around other people but how difficult extended periods of isolation can also be (though I have more or less lived as a hermit at times). For example, when I am in large crowds I sometimes feel like I am “less” of a person than I did before, just an ant in a sea of ants and today there are approximately 7.8 billion human beings on the planet. You might be the center of your universe, but you surely have at least one doppelganger out there.
I don’t think that my thoughts on the work are the totality of what this work is about. I feel this imagery taps into something very fitting for today and for the Covid pandemic.
I also included a drawing of Waldo from the beloved series of books “Where’s Waldo” into one of the drawings of this series as joke and a nod to the fact that artists like Hieronymus Bosch were the forefathers of the wimmerlbilderbuch. This might be the most difficult “Where’s Waldo” challenge ever.
By making the bodies cover the entire image, removing all scenery and adding humans walking on each other. the imagery takes on new meaning and a new visual format that is different from my previous drawings as there is generally less of a strong compositional direction in which the drawing leads the viewers eyes. It becomes almost like a pattern for a piece of fabric.
The idea of humans walking on each other inspires me to think of the adage that we “stand on the shoulders of those that went before us” through their accomplishments and ironically it also reminds how humans sometimes “walk all over” other people and use each other as “stepping stones” or as rungs on the “ladder of success” to get to where they want to be. I like the idea that it’s hard to tell if the people in the drawing simply have their eyes closed because they are blinking or unconscious or if they are dead, an idea that I’ve played with before in the past.
The pure massiveness of the crowd as well as the chaos in their arrangement makes me think of both the dangers of overpopulation (such as pandemics and environmental damage) as well as the simple frustrations and other problems that humans cause each other and the disorder and chaos make me think about how many problems on earth are largely a result of humans simply failing to coordinate things together well because of ineptitude and selfishness. For that reason, I don’t think of these drawings as a departure from my “Mother Earth is a Dirty Whore” series but simply a subcategory within it.
When I ruminate on this work, I also think about how the images are an expression of the feelings of social anxiety and claustrophobia that I sometimes feel when I’m around other humans. It fascinates me how frustrating it can be to be around other people but how difficult extended periods of isolation can also be (though I have more or less lived as a hermit at times). For example, when I am in large crowds I sometimes feel like I am “less” of a person than I did before, just an ant in a sea of ants and today there are approximately 7.8 billion human beings on the planet. You might be the center of your universe, but you surely have at least one doppelganger out there.
I don’t think that my thoughts on the work are the totality of what this work is about. I feel this imagery taps into something very fitting for today and for the Covid pandemic.
