Gib mir mehr Mensch
Exhibition
25
Mar–30 Apr 2021
In
his paintings Gustav Kluge explores questions of human existence, its
origin and manifestation. His painterly motifs are characterized by
his interest in the abysses of the human condition. Since 1995, he
has created a large number of portraits, in which he analyzes human
identity in particular in series of works.
The exhibition Gib
mir mehr Mensch
by Gustav Kluge at the Produzentengalerie Hamburg shows the eponymous
cycle of portraits, mostly of the same format. It was conceived
within three months in connection with Teamportrait
Moabit,
a project in collaboration with the therapists and staff of the
Treatment Center for Torture Victims in Berlin.
Kluge's original
idea to include patients in the team portrait was not feasible. These
missing portrait models and their noticeable gap for Kluge build the
background of the cycle. In the Center's archive, which contains a
press review, arranged by country, of torture practices worldwide,
the artist found a report on Danzig Sergeyevich Baldaev, a Russian
criminal investigator from Petrograd who had been a warden in a gulag
for years. His special achievement was an extensive graphic
documentation of everyday life in the camp and its horrors. Baldaev's
drawings are crude, semi-amateurish, and the portrayed, perpetrators
and victims alike, are anonymized. Victims and perpetrators of
violent acts form one strand of the cycle; Joseph Prym, a St. Quentin
inmate, a sought-after lover in prison life, Lucky Luciano, a
gunned-down Mafia boss, and a Chinese man imprisoned for decades in
an earthen cave by his village community because of his disability.
The ever-recognizable ambivalence of perpetrator and victim led Kluge
to Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster, a victim of biotechnical
hubris who becomes both perpetrator and avenger. Actor Boris
Karloff's solitary countenance, with its magnetic suggestion, merged
almost completely with his role, overlaying his later roles in other
films.
Two further guiding principles followed from this:
firstly, the idea of the dismembered face and fragmented identity,
which he illustrates through the montage of two individual portraits:
the portraits of Samuel Beckett and the miracle healer of the West
German 1950s Bruno Gröning are fused into one portrait, each with
one half of the face. Second, the discovery of the film face,
specifically the faces in science fiction films altered by mask work,
which suggest the possibility of a new hominid species. These two
guidelines led Kluge in research to a third, extreme biographies. One
example is the deformed face of Stephen Hawking, in which extreme
illness and extreme high ability merge into a singular physiognomy.
The extreme biographies also include Amanda Lepore or Christine
Wagenhäuser, who achieved an exaggerated female body through their
body and gender transformation.
Gib
mir mehr Mensch
can be understood as a contribution to the possibility of portraiture
today, a portrait painting beyond the commissioned portrait, in which
newer insights into the subject status of the individual and his
entanglements in and outbreaks from social pressures as well as his
psychological fragmentations are incorporated.
Analogous to
Warhol's thought that everyone can/should be a star for 15 minutes,
it can be said of the people in the cycle that they emerge from the
media stream elevated by painting to become a counterpart, if
possible for longer than 15 minutes. The subtitle of this series is
It’s a man's world,
since the people portrayed are primarily male. As a counterpart to
this cycle, Kluge's subsequent series Woman
under the influence
consist of portraits of women only.