Matthias Groebel

Matthias Groebel is a special type of painter. In place of a brush, Groebel used a construction that allowed him to translate television signals into digital pixels, extracting stills from satellite TV between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. These stills were then edited and transferred to canvas using a homemade automated airbrush pistol, dot by dot and line by line. Above all, Groebel was interested in images that were broadcast without being subject to any previous editorial control; close-ups of faces and body parts with a strong sense of physical presence, they speak of the almost intrusive intimacy television brought with it. The majority of works in Groebel’s solo exhibition at the Kunstverein (2022) were portraits, most of which gazed indirectly at visitors.
Groebel’s Jahresgabe edition also takes a special place within this series of works. What we see here are not faces whose expressions were originally captured by a television camera, but a smaller body part that, in movement, is every bit as revealing. These four small images of hands present a different fragment of the same narratives that Groebel previously transported from the television program to the exhibition space on large canvases. And yet the inscrutability that is automatically inscribed into any extracted detail whose before and after are unknown is clear here, too. There is a palpable sense of latent violence: one hand holds a pistol that seems to dissolve before its dark background, another is balled up into a fist that pushes against the edges of the image, while another seems almost to have been censored, blocked out by a dark shadow or something rectangular in its grip. And while there is no direct connection between these hands and the portraits exhibited at the Kunstverein last year, it is tempting to think these sheets might function as important clues that shed some light on the actions or emotional states of those portrayed in them.
– Gesa Hüwe