Gernot Faber DARK CITY
Gernot FaberWhat makes a person actually exist? Gernot Faber surfaces all of a sudden, and then disappears once again: a massive body with a large head, long oily hair, usually surrounded by an impressive artistic oeuvre consisting of drawings, paintings and collages. He is, however, not only an autodidactic artist, but also a gallerist or a booker for the rock band Dead Brains, which he started in London
. Here in Amsterdam since June of 2010, he runs a shop full of bizarre, indecipherable merchandising items which market himself: shop-te-huur. He fills fashion magazines with images, travels to Phuket and Romania and cashes in on one artists' stipend after another – and all this even though it all began with his death. Nevertheless, rising interest in him has brought him back from the grave time and again.
Gernot Faber is the construction of Sebastian Reuss (1974) and Lutz Krüger (1972). Through Faber they play with qualities like expectation, genius and dilettantism. Above all, they use Faber's interest in painting as a vehicle for dispensing with themselves psychologically. In this masquerade of cliché, Reuss and Krüger not only expose the voyeuristic expectations of the viewer, but they also pointedly reflect on the mechanisms of the art system. Or in Faber's 'own' words in response to the question, what would you choose as the most unique disguise: "A mask of my face on my face so that people think it's not me, but someone pretending to be me."
Everything that Gernot produces is an image, an illustration of himself. As part of the exhibition in W139, a peek into his psychoanalysis will help us catch a glimpse of this mask behind the mask: Dark City, in reference to Alex Proya's film of the same name.
In the entrance is Gernot Faber's SHOP-TE-HUUR.