Masks (Merkel F6.1)

2016 - Painting (Painting)

104.14 x 58.42 x 1.91 cm.

Simon Fujiwara

Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face. Masks (Merkel F6.1) was created in consultation with Merkel’s personal make-up artist; it features the special makeup that Merkel wears for HD cameras applied onto canvas. The image has been magnified to a near-microscopic level, rendering an ambiguous skin tone across which the makeup’s denser patches produce an abstract composition. Masks is an exhaustive and fragmented documentary project that intimately depicts one of the world’s most powerful women with an entirely new set of images that disappear the closer you approach. In this way, it takes the conventions of ethnographic imagery to a posthuman dimension by amplifying a constituent part of the complete subject of “Angela Merkel” to the point of unrecognizability.

The intersection of identity, memory, and history is taken up in Simon Fujiwara’s complex multimedia practice. The British-Japanese artist takes real world structures, thoughts, and events as his subject, constructing idiosyncratic narratives that emerge from these miasmatic creations. This work chronicles current conditions even as they demand attention in their capricious, oftentimes uncomfortable forms. While his practice borders on anthropological in its examinations, the products that derive from his work often turns their speculation towards the work’s viewership, who become affectively compelled to examine their own subjectivity in interacting with Fujiwara’s oeuvre.

Colors:

• mask.n.01
• make_up.v.09
• collective history
• contemporary conceptualism
• found objects
• mixed-media
• british