wall paintings

My "wall paintings" intend to express permanent change. An old wall, e.g., tells its history, is subject to continuous renewal. When I touch the wall I feel connected with the past, and with people who left their traces there.

In the beginning of the 1990s I got interested in inscriptions on walls (graffiti) and I started to use calligraphic elements in my paintings, i.e., characters, symbols, and numbers. For my paintings I use tempera or acryl on paper, fixed on cardboard or wood, sometimes structured with gypsum.

In many of my paintings I use Arabic characters and sequences of numerals. I was inspired by old temple inscriptions with numbers that represent coded text. The coding had magic meaning and hardly anyone could decode it. The calligraphic elements resemble the symbols in old Babylonian or Egyptian temple inscriptions. I am particularly interested in the relationship between the individual characters and feel a magic force originating from these inscriptions.

The characters in my paintings have no concrete meaning. The occupation with the characters and numbers, however, is of great importance to me; it influences my awareness of life and my attitude towards my inner and outer life.

To me, an old wall expresses decay and growth, death and renascence, destruction and reconstruction, war and peace. As the wall is painted and re-painted, the layers become documents of the past. In a weathered wall the different layers emerge and reveal its history.