Psychopomp is a series of silkscreen prints based on graffiti from a “ghost station” in the former East Berlin underground, dating between 1950 – 1989. The content of what I found ranged from silly to fascist, and it presented different questions from other graffiti I had worked with: whether political intention – or any subjective meanings at all – could be embedded in the gestures and strokes that make up a graffito. What essential aspects of inscribed messages remain, when their order is disrupted?
I separated the strokes of each graffito, preserving the direction and form of each line while undoing and rearranging images. The result is abstraction that refers to an original graffito only in the sense that the shape of the lines came from the same hand, with the same range of motion.
Psychopomp was exhibited at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2017.
98×97 cm 2016 unique silkscreen print and pencil on Xuan paper, made from the inscribed feature image (above)
Collection of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt
107×97 cm 2016 unique silkscreen print and pencil on Xuan paper
all the letters “e” found in the underground, in reference to Perec (1969)
82×97 cm 2016 unique silkscreen print and pencil on Xuan paper
silkscreen prints, metal shelves, block of wood
39×50 cm frottage on Xuan paper, from graffito found in Gesundbrunnen underground 2016