GABI TRINKAUS | Pulse

May 2 - May 25, 2024

‘SHAKE THE BAG’

I came upon this technique of collage work in the early 2000’s, having been preoccupied with questions of lifestyle media’s “wish producing dreamland” for quite some time and waiting for the idea to settle in the material form of an artwork. Which it did eventually by my realization that no material would provide a more self explanatory and transparent nature to my intended way of critical media questioning than actual magazine paper.

Pages from high glossy magazines “cut to need” into clippings of various sizes, topics and shades supply the source material for my works.

The leader of lifestyle’s all time favourite list — the “woman perfect” — led me to a collage portraiture style l’d more accurately describe as a “makeover”: Media footage originating from ads, fashion spreads and beauty inserts gets re-constructed on a larger scale by “dressing the skeleton” of a line drawing on canvas with the found paper cut outs.

The resulting works, “head shots” and bodies never fully covered by the printed matter, allow the process to remain transparent; the fragmentation of the image documents both the creative process as well as the critical impact. Vulnerability shows in the unfinished faces’ empty spaces through which the underlying drawing protrudes like the “cutting pattern” for a surgeon.

Ironically enough, our culture seems to more greatly arouse questions of “succeeding” than those of “surviving”. The print media provides innumerable pages with answers of how this “success” might look like. And I tear them out, cut them up and ‘shake the bag’.

Gabi Trinkaus