DeePee
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DeePee (born January 5, 1954 in Bad Kreuznach ) is a contemporary German painter and graphic artist.
Life
childhood and education
Early years
He does not provide any information about his parents or his real name. He grew up in a petty-bourgeois environment and, according to his own account, suffered from the intellectual narrowness of his environment in early childhood. In 1972 he left the local high school with the Abitur. He was already enthusiastic about art in his school days, and he soon began to be an artist himself. The first attempts with oil paints didn't appeal to him and so he quickly switched to tempera paints and colored pencils. At the age of 18, he and some like-minded friends founded an artist group in his hometown (KKK, Künstler Kreis Kreuznach) in order to exchange and exhibit artistically. The city made rooms available for the young people, and so the first exhibitions could take place. As a staunch pacifist, he refused military service with a weapon and in 1973/1974 performed alternative civilian service in a specialist hospital for addicts in Kirchheimbolanden in the Palatinate, where he also met his first partner, Ulrike Meindl. Together with her he moved to Wiesbaden in 1976.
Education
Although his family tried to persuade him to pursue a civil service career, DeePee decided to study art. In 1975 he was rejected by the Karlsruhe Art Academy in the portfolio examination, which left him in a deep depression. In the 1975 winter semester, the Rhineland-Palatinate University of Applied Sciences accepted him to study visual communication, and in the 1976 summer semester he passed the entrance exam at the Mainz University of Art, where he pursued an intensive course of study with a focus on screen printing and painting until 1984 Award 'graduated. At the beginning of his studies he had to realize that the days of surrealism and fantastic realism were long over, which in turn caused confusion, uncertainty and depression. In the years to come, he tried non-representational painting and, influenced by his field of study screen printing , Pop Art . Artists like Andy Warhol , Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg became his new heroes.
When his partner Ulrike Meindl presented her work to the Rencontres internationales de Lure in Provence in 1982 , he accompanied her with a trunk full of his own pictures. In Lure he met Jacques-Élie Chabert and Camille Philibert from Paris and an intense friendship developed through which he came together with a number of other artists. Until 1989 he spent about two years in Paris with interruptions.
The art production
screen printing
From his studies until the big break in 1988, DeePee worked almost exclusively in the technique of screen printing. The industrial character of this printing technique suggested a stylistic relationship to the older artists of Pop Art. Nevertheless, the pictures cannot be assigned to this art direction. DeePee himself referred to his style at this time as Bas Art (French low art as opposed to the common term 'high art').
Infrared
At the end of the 1970s, the new artistic medium Graphzine emerged in Paris . In 1983, Camille Philibert and Jacques-Élie Chabert suggested DeePee to take part in their Graphzine Toi et Moi pour Toujours. “ What the hell is a graphzine? I asked and they patiently tried to explain it to me. But how do you explain what it is to someone who has never seen anything like it? It is something like a magazine. But mostly own pictures are printed. So it's something like a small art exhibition. An exhibition in the form of a booklet - I didn't understand a word. But since I was always in the mood for new things and at exhibitions anyway, I gave them a few of my pictures and said they should do what they wanted with them. I still didn't know what it was going to be, but couldn't imagine that anything really sensible could come of it ”. On their next visit to Wiesbaden, the Parisian artists brought the No. 1 of their issue with them, and DeePee decided to publish a graphzine himself. Between 1984 and 1988 8 issues of INFRArot were created, hand-screen printed by the artist himself. After the resumption of art production in 2013, eight further editions were published.
The break
After completing his studies in 1986, the question of earning a living arose. DeePee couldn't live from his pictures, so he started to work as a graphic designer for a small specialist publisher in Wiesbaden. In mid-1988, the trendy brand Swatch hired him as marketing director. For a man who had neither studied marketing nor had any other marketing knowledge, an extraordinary challenge to learn by doing. Not only did DeePee not have the time to deal intensively with art production, the urge to work as an artist also subsided. At first he got his Parisian artist friends Placid and Olivia Clavel smaller jobs in advertising production, but gradually the interest in art waned completely. In 1991 DeePee left Swatch and founded the advertising agency 'at work' with a friend. Swatch was a starting customer and opened many doors for both of them. After the friends fell out, he left at work and founded the trend agency 'Basis Rose' in 1995. After another falling out, DeePee withdrew from Wiesbaden and from 2000 worked in Heidesheim near Mainz under the name 'Roses Advertising Agency'. For 25 years, DeePee had no contact with the art world. Not only did he stop producing, he no longer showed any interest in the fine arts. “I stopped going to exhibitions and didn't even notice what was happening outside in the art world.” When space ran out during a move in 1991, he threw everything that was left of his art production in the trash.
Restart - everything to zero
In 2013 the urge to art returned - “suddenly”, as he says. DeePee began again with attempts at painting and very quickly found his own style back, which continued the work up to 1987 without simply adopting the imagery. During his first visit to Paris in a long time, he met his old artist friends again. Placid, a close friend from the old Parisian group, convinced DeePee that it was important to revive INFRArot. In December 2013 INFRArot # 9 'INFRArot reLoaded' was released with new pictures by old comrades Placid, Bruno Richard, Kiki Picasso etc.
adora quod incendisti, incendes quod adorasti
In 2014 he created the cycle 'adora quod incendisti, incendes quod adorasti', revised art prints of saints from the early 20th century including frames.
master race
In 2015 DeePee visited the Osthofen Concentration Camp Memorial. He says: "In my school days, the atrocities of the Nazis were an important topic for us, since most of our teachers (the older ones) were at best followers, if not worse." On the same day he starts his cycle 'master race'. The cycle includes 50 works of various sizes. A comprehensive catalog has been published for this cycle.
Totem & Taboo
Currently (since the end of 2017) DeePee is working on the cycle Totem & Taboo (based on the work of Sigmund Freud ).
Master Race 2.0 - Remember Me
In May 2019, DeePee visits the memorials of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. What he experienced there (the gigantic extent of the 'Auschwitz murder machine', according to his words and conversations with survivors of the concentration camp) exceeded everything he had previously experienced on this subject. So he tied back to the cycle 'Herrenrace', including family photos of victims found in the memorial before their internment in the pictures.
style
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DeePee himself describes his style as 'Hardkitsch DeLuxe', a term he developed with his Parisian friends in the 1980s. When he sometimes speaks of 'New Post Pop Surrealism', it sounds more like a corruption of the constant search for new style terms, but it also shows that he is again allowing surrealist and pop art tendencies to flow into his world of images.
Since his preoccupation with the subject of 'master race', DeePee has also called his pictures 'degenerate art'. "What was a devastating swear word under National Socialism, I use today as an 'honorary title'."
Typical of his work is the serial repetition of identical picture elements, be it grid areas, arrows and crosses or representational representations such as portraits, bones and barbed wire. The many small sub-levels within his pictures are sometimes reminiscent of comics. DeePee refuses to provide interpretations for its images. He claims that whatever a viewer sees in his pictures is also in them, even if he as an artist does not know anything about it. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that recurring elements such as garden gnomes and roaring deer should allude to the petty bourgeoisie of his origin.
Exhibitions
- 1975 Gallery in the tower, Bad Kreuznach
- 1987 INFRArot and his gang, Paris, Poitiers, Toulouse, Barcelona and Mannheim
- 1987 La Hune, Paris
- 2014 at WebEnd, Kaiserslautern
- 2014 INFRArot retrospective, Kunstverein Mainz
- 2015 Central Institute for Art History , Munich
- 2016 Herrenrasse, Kunstverein Mainz
- 2016 ZENIT, Kaiser & Cream Art-District, Wiesbaden
- 2017 Animals in the City ..., Kunstarche Wiesbaden
- 2018 BBK 70, Gallery of the Professional Association of Visual Artists Rhld.-Palatinate, Mainz
- 2018 bright to violent, Boppard
- 2019 Festival of the Arts, Westhofen
- 2019 Substance of the city - Tanke, Mainz
- 2019 Gallery Schauraum, Worms
Publications and lectures
Magazines and journals
- INFRArot (Wiesbaden / Mainz)
- RAW (New York)
- Liberation (Paris daily newspaper)
- Illustration (Tokyo)
- Toi et Moi pour Toujours (Paris)
- Au Sec! (Paris)
- La Poire d'Angoisse (Bordeaux)
- EXIT (Mainz)
- Crocodila Mundi (Brussels)
- Amtramdram (Paris)
- NO ART (Los Angeles)
- Color Portraits of the Heaven (Brussels)
- Complot Graphique (Perpignan)
- Canal (Paris)
- Neukölln Jungle (Berlin)
Book publications
- coquor ergo sum - DeePee's cookbook
Lectures
- 1992: Frankfurt am Main, Swatch - A Success Story (Management Circle)
- 1993: Nice, Swatch - A Success Story (Management Circle)
- 2014: Graphzines in France - The first years (Zinefest Berlin / Zinefest Darmstadt)
- 2015: Graphzines in France - The first years (Walpodenakademie Mainz)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Vita on the artist's website, accessed on November 18, 2016
- ↑ History of infrared on the website of the artist, accessed on November 18, 2016
- ↑ INFRArot # 14, Herrenrasse - Exhibition catalog for the cycle 'Herrenrasse', Mainz 2016
- ↑ Press release on the Herrenrasse exhibition, Mainz 2016
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | DeePee |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter and graphic artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 5th January 1954 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bad Kreuznach |