Andrea Dettmar.

BIOGRAPHY:

Andrea Dettmar was born in Landau, Pfalz, Germany. She attended the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf and studied under Prof. Siegfried Anzinger. She then studied at Goldsmiths College in London, England where she received her MFA. She currently lives and works in London.

INTERVIEW:

The following is a excerpt from an interview with Andrea Dettmar.

AH: I want to first ask you about the development of your visual language as a painter. As a painter, you operate within a long, rich, and often criticized tradition. A tradition that involves a constant investigation into painting's rhetoric. How does your constructed language or rhetoric respond and or exist within the tradition of painting? and, how does your developed visual language serve to create the objectivity of your paintings?

AD: Of course, painting has been criticized a lot, and I have been at least to one funeral myself, but for me art is about the possibility and the freedom to do what ever you like to do.

There are no restrictions or limitations in art. I think you just have to set up your own boundaries. My territory therefore is painting in all its so called limitations, but it offers you a lot of opportunities at the same time, it is the very special freedom of it, I would say. You have to twist around, OK I agree, but there is still enough space for me. And in terms of dealing with images, regarding existing paintings, or regarding all the images that are out there, there is still a lot to handle. I mean, why should you stop writing prose, poetry and dramas? Painting is an integral part of visual culture and not just a local dialect thatŐs close to extinction. Basically itŐs a visual language like photography, film, video and so on; they are all part of one family. Their relationship is sometimes maybe a little incestuous but still very fertile.

You ask me how I developed my own language. I did build it up very slowly, trying not to be too hasty, mainly trying to avoid a personal gesture, a personal expression.

I picked up words here and there, because of their sound, others because they looked so nice written down, you know, I most of all stole them like a little magpie.

And I did pick them up in all the areas that are related to visual culture, not only in painting history, because a beautifully decorated and varnished truck means as much to me as a film or a classical painting does.

One of the most important things to me though is, that you have to decide in which tone you want to speak, or even if you want to whisper or shout. I had words in the beginning, but no structure, no syntax. I wanted to use a diverse language, a conglomeration of words, something wobbly that is neither about the skill of using the brush and the paint, nor about self expression or authenticity.

I mean, the process of painting is very important to me, and often closer to the idea of crafts than to painting itself. It is an applying of paint, and the finished painting usually still recalls the process of how it was built up.

I simply like the idea of the imperfection of a painting, but the beauty of trying. The failing is not an heroic attitude around paintings but actually the fun part in it. It is a puzzle, a game.

I tried to develop a language that is flexible to its subject, and most of all ironic to itself, no maybe not ironic you know it's like the difference between a conjurer and a folly, the conjurer is playing tricks to amaze you, and the folly just makes you laugh.

Of course it is not only about telling a joke. But I think my attitude is much more influenced by the idea of playing with the references you use, than by the idea of paying them respect.

Objectivity therefore is not really something I relate my work to. It is in a way irrelevant to me, because as much as I try to play, perform or twiddle, as much do I think that the viewers are going through their own experiences by looking at it.

I simply more and more try to keep things open. Of cause there is the risk that you might get me completely wrong, but I mean, as long as you get me.

AH: There is definitely a mood to your work a humorous and disturbing one. The effect that this mood creates falls more in line with a Romantic tradition of painting rather than an ironic or Post-modern tradition of painting. Would this be a correct statement even though you did mentioned the ideas of games and references? And, could we say that the process that occurs in the studio remains an intuitive one rather than an academic one?

AD: First of all I think that an intuitive approach is a highly academic one. What I mean is that in my education the generation that came before mine were mainly Neo Expressionist and Junge Wilde. So they made a stand against Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual Art and so on. They were mainly related to Punk and Street Art. They were just painting like crazy no matter what. So I actually ran against this wall. I was searching for something colder or more controlled and cynical. That's how I developed my language. Sometimes I wish there would be something non academic to do still, but I am part of it already, there is no outside for me.

The mood that you talk about is something that I thought about much later, probably at a point where I felt quite frustrated with this postmodern references and the idea of reproducing. It is kind of hard for me to talk about all that because my practice changed quite a lot in the last year. The language that I use today still connects to these days, I would say, but today I use it in a different way. I probably just don't think about these categories that much anymore. I am much more intuitive now in the process of painting, but usually I am quite cool when it comes to the decision making in terms of images and formal decisions.

I just really struggle with the word romantic, because in a way I think that I am too humorous for it or too, how can you say, to undecided in the intention of the outcome. There is more space for the viewer, I hope, than a romantic approach would allow. What comes across is maybe the passion I have for a subject, and that can be dark or light, funny or sad, but it does not completely fit the term as I understand it. I probably just do not want to be romantic for there is that high risk of getting sentimental, which I really don't like.