Real Scenes

Someone said: "Hey, this reminds of Courbet"; I did not know whether I should take it as an insult or a compliment. Someone else said: "No, no, no, the theme and the execution are totally conservative, one does not paint this way today"; this was fairly direct, that much I understood. Yet someone else said: "You've got to have nerves of steel, I could never do something like this"; that person clearly did not quite know what to say. And then someone said: "Fucking great, man"; this was an expression of utter admiration.

I said: "In producing these paintings I could not rely on any of the painting methods of the past century. They mostly tended towards reduction, while the lengthy and at times tedious procedure applied here aims at a pronounced individualization of the motif. On television I saw that artists

working for the Disney Studios do something similar to what I was doing: in sketches they gather information that they later use in the making of a scene. Looking at a painting I was working on at the time, I had the feeling that it was an adequate setting for a possible event, that the next moment something could happen there, so I named it ' Scene in the Woods, as if Made for a Story'. And subsequently I gave the name of a scene to all paintings I made by applying such a painstaking and lengthy procedure."

The works presented here were shown in different combinations at various one-man and group exhibitions between 1996 and 2001, but never as a thematic whole.