After 25 years of independent artistic practice, I turn my gaze to a world in which ‘a real life in a false one’ no longer seems possible.

Born in Hungary in 1942, I have lived and worked in Erlangen since 1972. After studying electrical engineering and computer science at Karlsruhe University of Technology, I initially worked for five years as an advertising consultant in industry, then for ten years as a writer and producer of documentary films, and in 1980 I founded my own media agency, which I ran until 2000. It was only after that that I turned my attention exclusively to art.

 In my work, I combine classical visual worlds – such as those of Botticelli and Raphael – with processes of destruction: burning, cutting out or, for example, painting over. In this way, icons of art history become the scenes of a double devastation: cultural and ecological.

The current focus of my work is the ‘Adorno Cycle’. Cycle I is a series of 11 large-format paintings (some conceived as diptychs and triptychs, painted in oil on canvas, each measuring 140 x 120 cm), in which I visualise Adorno’s dictum ‘There is no right life in the wrong one’. The series addresses environmental destruction and the legacy of European art history in the face of the climate crisis.

I see my work as a belated, concentrated response to experiences in technology, media and image production: it asks what remains of ‘beauty’ when its prerequisites – living nature, credible images, political public sphere – are eroding.