Friedemann Heckel has always drawn figures, but rarely included them in his public artistic practice. In his new series of watercolors, he links his interest in drawings of the human body with the visual worlds of the social-media platform Instagram. Heckel takes motifs he finds that focus on staging and revealing the subject’s own body and address the publication of private images in a playful or provocative way. The rapid change of images and the fleeting gaze while browsing the platform are interrupted while the artist paints. His goal is less to create a new picture, but rather an act of redrawing and feeling his way through the pictures, exploring an approach to longing, desire, voyeurism, and the dramatic flood of images.
Text: Leah Heckel
