Alex Tennigkeit
Alex Tennigkeit expands the pictographic projections of painting and drawing by using elements or objects of installation. The large-sized paintings, with their strategies of image formation bring to mind the sampling of different motive-models from the area of commercial popular culture. She works with image and text quotations from the different areas of film, music, fashion and advertising. She operates with the most superficial sectors of the media-world. Naked bodies, smiling beauties, fast cars and other symbols of modern Pop-Culture all have a place in her paintings and drawings. Alex Tannigkeit gives these objects of desire something that is usually missing - a double and diabolic meaning. Her work lets the medial propagandised status symbols melt together with apocalyptic and archaic elements. Only in this way can its genuinely threatening and aggressive character be discovered. Especially, the combination of ornament-like text which is interlaced into the picture give her work an exceptional symbolic 'static' and undermines the apparent desirability of the picture.
She opens her website with the plea of forgiveness and an avowal, which appears fragmentarily again and again in her work. "Father forgive me…/ I'll never come out of these blues alive/ I love lonesome nights/ Life is only a dream/ Forever's a long, long time"
Alex Tennigkeit, After the Show..., 2004, Tusche auf Papier, 29,7 x 21 cm.
Curriculum vitae
Lives and works in Berlin
Alex Tennigkeit, Phoenix (Coldhearted, Furious and Insane), 2004, Öl auf Leinwand, 250 x 220 cm.
Exhibitions, festivals (selection)
Solo exhibitions
"I never get out of these Blues alive", mit Marius Diaconu, Flugzeughangar, Karlsruhe
Group exhibitions
Queens Hotel, Karlsruhe