Arndt

The protagonists in the drawings and collages of Douglas Kolk, who was born in Newark (USA) in 1963, find themselves thrown into a chaotic space of images that teems with signs of our fashiondominated and media-stricken culture. Amidst consumer goods floating freely about, there are weak contour lines outlining faces and fragments of bodies – and these sketched figures combine into ephemeral beings staring into the void like fashionista zombies. They are surrounded by hovering ghosts, skulls, and monstrous grimaces – detached from the context of fashion statements – that sometimes even become part of them. Reference to the attributes of youth culture is also made by hoodie shirts, high heels, and sneakers. There is a certain fragility and subtle beauty in these figures – like a picture puzzle, they sway between inner pressure and outward frailty, between deformation and fragility. They are not able to cope with this conflict– just the opposite: they are destroyed by this conflict while they either exude indifference on the outside or articulate their rage, yearning, and fears only in fragments. This is how the dazzling multitude of visual codes in our world of consumption turns into the backdrop of an inescapable psychic inferno that will never come to an end. Here, there is a linkage to the artist himself, who ceased his artistic work in 1999 as a result of excessive drug consumption and started to work again only in 2004. Today Douglas Kolk and his family live in Boston. His works are featured in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Falckenberg collection in Hamburg. Upcoming exhibitions: Mary Boone Gallery, New York, Kunsthalle Mannheim and Arndt & Partner (in late August 2006).

© Douglas Kolk, Walldrawing, clouds / shadow - 2707 sun -109 from the series "suicide girl", 2006, acrylic on wall