Sebastiaan Schlicher, Thijs Zweers

drawings, work on paper

10 November – 23 December 2012

In Sebastian Schlicher’s (1975) drawings ecstatic stage performers, cult members, religious types, occultists, survivalists or politicians appear who are in a state of melancholia, rage or fear. They have put themselves into a pathetic battle mode, struggling to get through life, trying to find heroic, symbolic ways to overcome their own mortality and insignificance. According to Sebastian Schlicher everyone is working on their own heroic project, the larger-than-life personality is a favourite metaphor in his work. Besides making drawings Schlicher also initiates projects to which he invites musicians and friends to contribute. The result is always attributed to the fictional group, Amerikan Teenager. The projects consist of making making cooperative wallpaintings, videos, stage performances and gigs that are monitored on the blog http://amerikanteenager.blogspot.de

Thijs Zweers (1986) thinks of the internet as an ever-expanding virtual universe, parallel to our own world. From the enormous supply of digital information, he chooses fragments of images and meticulously reproduces them using the traditional medium of the drawing. The new, assembled images are often narrative or bizarre. An example of this is his drawing of an Amazonian Indian standing amongst four Nazi officers in a posh drawing room..While scouring the internet, Thijs Zweers uses a search method that entails continuing his search on part of an image. As if by a controlled coincidence, he subsequently travels further and further into the endless bulk of images.