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Egon Erwin Kisch
from Christian Schad 1928
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Painting is Dead - Death is Dead
57,1" x 39,0"
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 is painting does not emphasize the sadness of death, nor is it a reminder of mortality, even though there are repeating skulls in my paintings.
I like to use well known phrases and would like to give them a reverse meaning, as I did in a previous painting The only good artist is a dead artist in which I referred to the struggle for existance.
Now I would like to proclaim a manifesto against the repeatedly uttered saying: "Painting is dead"
in which the commercial art business would like to convince us that painting is finally out of fashion and we should forget about it completely.
It seems like a suicidal move to still be painting in this fast moving world of multimedia.
But despite the made up saying that painting is dead which I ignore and triumph over, by standing on the dead Grim Reaper himself, I proved that painting is not dead yet, because I am still doing it. I even snatched the scythe out of his hand.
Like a big game hunter I pose on the chest of Death.
Defiantly, I declare: "Death is dead!"
In 1999 the famed British artist David Hockney was saying:
"Painting ain’t dead, it has just been resurrected."
The mice in the foreground are again a symbol for the German nickname for money, of which an artist always has too little. The exceptions would be the darlings of the art world that Tom Wolfe is describing in his book The Painted Word.
The style in this painting is a mix of Renaissance Art by Sandro Botticelli, while the background is an Italian landscape from the Romanticism.
Will I be unfaithful to the style of my role model
Fernando Botero?
Will I find myself in the New Objectivity movement fom Christian Schad (a German painter 1894 - 1982)?
Is it a revival of the Naïve Art, or Primitivism from
Henri Rousseau?
Even though it should not be of my concern to categorize my art, I am always trying to find my place among like-minded artists.
Renaissance Art, Naïve Art, New Objectivity, Realism,
or none of the above?
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