Silja Addy
Malerei
12.10. – 09.11.2003

The paintings of Silja Addy (born in Berlin in 1968) are set pieces from the media world that has long dominated our perception of reality. Silja Addy’s artistic work should also be viewed in the context of the current trend toward images becoming independent of their medium.
Silja Addy grew up with photography and chose painting, a style of painting that borders on photography and technical images. Photographic images or technical still images provide the source material for her large-format tableaux. Individual motifs are filtered out and transferred layer by layer onto the canvas in oil paint. The (consistent) large format draws attention to the image, which becomes the vehicle for the painting. The aesthetic strategy of this realistic painting is not to compete academically with the technical image, nor is it a melancholic swan song to the individual photographic image, whose future in the 21st century is unclear in the cycle of digital transformation and simulation. Rather, this painting draws on the aesthetic potential of new media in order to plunder it for its own purposes, to engage in close combat with the possibilities of painting and the reality of painting in the context of the reality of current industrialized image production.

Today, digital media demonstrate in concrete terms what photography had already hinted at: although a medium (photographic paper, monitor, etc.) is needed to view images, the images themselves also exist independently of their manifestations, e.g., as a countable amount of data stored in the camera. The new image type is concretized through the concretization of individual pieces of information. Awareness of this fact forms the background for the system of relationships between the different modes of representation in photography and painting in Silja Addy’s artistic concept.

The switching, or zapping, that Silja Addy cultivates between technical and painterly modes of representation breaks open the inner reflection of contemporary image production. When the artist plays off the photorealism of painting against the abstraction of photography, or when she disempowers the photographic motif through her painterly style. Rather, this painting draws on the aesthetic potential of new media in order to plunder it for her own purposes, to engage in close combat with the possibilities of painting and the reality of painting in the context of the reality of current industrialized image production.

Silja Addy’s working principle manifests itself in the form of series and sequences, with a motif being explored in several variations. Each series on a motif is a self-contained system; the artist works on the individual sequences simultaneously, and each individual sequence is valid as a single image. The translation of the technical trigger into painterly gesture, the concretization of the image using the means of large-format painting, manifests painting as a symptom of extensive image production that feeds our contemporary society and our experience of life. (It is no coincidence that the subjects of Silja Addy’s paintings come from a pool of documented experiences). Today, memory seems to be essentially linked to images, and memory in images depends on what the image allows as such—sometimes more, sometimes less.

Silja Addy

Curated by Thomas Trümper.