Shortly before the pandemic in March 2020, I decided to go to Luxembourg, my (other) home country. I spent a whole year there and had time and inspiration to dedicate myself to my new series of works "Open Premises". 

Previously, I worked on three-dimensional plexiglass objects that allow the recipients to walk around the objects, whereby the different perspectives are meant to convey new impressions by opening up different points of view and avoiding rigidity. The process of creation itself, the assembling of the individual parts into a whole thus becomes an integral part of the multi-dimensional works. During the COVID-19 pandemic however, the material plexiglass, which I had been working with until then, suddenly took on a new
meaning, because it was now needed to build partition walls to reduce infection risk. The waiting time for orders was up to two months. I therefore temporarily suspended working with that material for moral reasons.
In the series "Open Premises" I use acrylic and lacquer paint instead of oil paint. The similar surface quality of the plexiglass and the acrylic is ideal to create a tension between shiny and matt surfaces. The canvases are also a return from three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional images. The colours are bright, often garish, this is also in contrast to an earlier black and white series on canvas. The colours are chosen to emphasise both the artificiality and the radically present nature of the works. All the new works have the format 6:7, a medium format from photography that was also called the royal or ideal format. The reference to photography stems from my involvement in photography and film courses in Luxembourg before I was a student at the UDK - both fields are still very important to me.
Surfaces are covered by other surfaces, others suggest what is happening behind them. The forms are abstract, the way they handle flatness, but also the location of the artworks in space are essential for the effect. Over the last few years I have made many quick, often small sketches to see what images come out of my inner self. A performative pictorial language, like a lexicon, emerged
from this exercise, which is not used like an alphabet but occurs each time in a changed form, a new, constructive appearance in a new act. The formal language of my work also reflects the present chaos and the constant desire to control this chaos.

The doors / walls / panes shown in the works are framed by the mostly unpainted edges of the canvases. These surreal windows are connected to an aspect of art history, opening up a view onto a musical-performative universe and turning the laws of gravity and perspective upside down. The view through the window represents a connection between the protected space and the stranger in the
distance, whereby the isolation of the inner space strengthens the desire for the unknown outside, as we all discovered in pandemic. Move closer to the canvases and you find that the assumed precision of line and execution is a deception. This is done deliberately so that the artistic process can be understood.

I have been making music, playing guitar and composing songs for many years. Music inspires and is omnipresent in my work. Improvisation, free jazz elements and the movement of performative elements are reflected in "Open Premises". The different stages of the creative process are inextricably linked. Since my works are to be understood as "work in progress" in a constant state of "becoming", this also invites participation, because it gives the recipients the opportunity to engage with the unceasing process of creation.