 Part
IV_Borrowed Images
Works in the Exhibition | Interview
Thomas Helbig: Pferd, 2005
Photo: courtesy Goetz Collection
Wilfried Petzi, Munich
Works in the Exhibition
Träumer, 2004, Oil on canvas
Frau, 2004, Oil and varnish on hardboard
Tänzerin, 2004, mixed media (plastic, PU foam, paint) sculpture on plinth
Schlange, 2004, mixed media, sculpture and plinth (plastic, paint, PU-foam)
Pferd, 2005, Oil on canvas
Frau, 2005, mixed media, sculpture on plinth (plastic, paint, PU-foam)
Interview
Katharina Vossenkuhl:
The fourth part of the exhibition series Imagination Becomes Reality, which explores the perception of contemporary and emerging art in the Goetz Collection, has the subtitle Borrowed Images. Are there in fact borrowed images in your work?
Thomas Helbig: If, by that, you mean mental images that have been stored in the mind at some point, then, yes, of course, I carry them around with me just like everyone else. But the overpaintings are paintings or prints that I have reworked. The difference is only in the material because you are constantly processing and reworking mental images anyway.
Katharina Vossenkuhl: Such as, for example, your drawings, which are never reworked?
Thomas Helbig: Yes. In the overpaintings I wanted to recharge these pictures. Most of the pictures are from the flea market. I would say they're mostly the 'monarch of the glen' type of thing, but there are also reproductions of old masters.
Katharina Vossenkuhl: Pictures that would usually be found in a rather stuffy living room?
Thomas Helbig: That's what I grew up with. So when I see pictures like that, there is of course a certain sense of recognition. It might have something to do with nostalgia as well. When I was a child that was a world of mystery - one that I probably want to rediscover. It's gone forever, but the present is still permeated with it. Maybe these pictures are a kind of paradise lost for me.
Text excerpt »From Rome to Rosenheim via Südseehausen« - A Conversation with Thomas Helbig,
Berlin, March 2006
(Author: Katharina Vossenkuhl), Exhibition Catalogue Imagination Becomes Reality Part IV_Borrowed Images
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