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Honesty, Because You're Worth It
2012
acrylic on canvas
Two parts: 90 x 75 cm and 85 x 85 cm
(35 x 30 and 33 x 33 ins)
Felix Gmelin uses painting, photography, film,
and sound to create spatial montages that explore our collective
memory and dreams about the future. In re-editing found footage
from archives and material belonging to his father, a German
film-maker and educator, Gmelin exploits the potential of repetition
and dis-placement as a productive force. Although by no means
nostalgic, Gmelin’s art revisits the past, most often
the 1960’s, to produce its own sense of history. In doing
so what he looks for are not obsolete forms but tools for the
future. Together the parts of his practice form an open constellation
of historical and iconographic associations, continuities and
ruptures. If the traditions of cinema and visual arts have today
entered into a state of profound uncertainty, then perhaps,
Gmelin seems to suggest, their pieces can be disassembled and
reassembled to create forms that think. |
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What Would Jesus Say?
2012
Two parts: 74 x 54 cm and 75 x 90 cm
(29 x 21 ins and 30 x 35 ins)
oil and acrylic on canvas |
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Real Democracia Now
2011
oil and acrylic on canvas
Three parts: 85 x 85cm, 75 x 95 cm and 75 x 90 cm
(33 x 33ins, 29 x 37ins and 29 x 35ins) |
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A Second Attempt to Finish My Father’s Feminist Édouard Manet
2010
One channel video (by Otto Gmelin) and oil and c-print on canvas 68 x 82cm
Installation dimensions approx. 320 x 175 cm
As the title suggests, in this installation comprising of Gmelin’s father film and a painting on c-print, Gmelin attempts to conclude his father’s work. Otto Gmelin (1931 - 1996) was a German film-maker, media-theoretician, educator and archivist. In his experimental seminars, he re-enacted well known events and artworks with his students. Here, he conducted a feminist re-staging of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe - notice that in Otto’s films the sexes of the figures are reversed. Felix is interested in how context illuminates sense, and here he paints in a landscape atop a still from his father’s film to provide the figures with scenery once again. Via a detour the image is returned to its original language. As Felix Gmelin circumnavigates back to moments in the collective memory via his personal one, public and personal memory are compressed. Gmelin exploits the potential of repetition as a productive force. In so doing what he evokes are not obsolete forms but tools for the future. |
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Stills from A Second Attempt to Finish
My Father’s Feminist Édouard Manet
2010
One channel video (by Otto Gmelin) and oil
and c-print on canvas
68 x 82cm
Installation dimensions approx. 320 x 175 cm |
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