„A FOREIGN BODY“

As often in my exhibitions, here I draw together several threads from my working fundus. On the walls hang pictures, juxtaposing depictions of cactuslike groups (communities) with monochrome worked-through surfaces (environments).

The communities are made in very vivid colors mostly in front of a likewise intensively colored background. They recall group portraits of “foreign tribes” or “families”, motley and folkloristic gatherings of figures. The environments are characterized by strict ordering principles which are emphasized in their obsessive purposefulness by a metallic ground. As a working strategy, I undertook to make these two streams of pictures in parallel, using identical formats: thus each motley-folk family is assigned its specific monochrome (and vice versa). The portrait titled “Hottentotten” is allocated the pattern “Ordnung und Fortschritt” (order and progress).

In the exhibition itself this strategy emerges out of the background, as the pictures hang mixed without a clearly perceptible ordering of their size formats. As mediator between the two image types, that is to say between communities and environments, I have placed ceramic sculptures. These, cast in monochrome, are remarkable in their gestural forms; they stand in the exhibition as commentators.

At once and as well, they make the “foreign body” visible: namely the body of the artist Lorenzo Pompa, and its effect.

My work is consistently the result of intensive physical work, so that I have come to believe over the years that my body, through intrinsic knowledge and memory, in great measure serves to shape the individuality and character of my pieces. My artwork shows me what my body knows and reminds me again and again: that nothing is more providential than one’s own physical self.

I was born in Krefeld, Germany and was raised in Rome. I finished my studies archicture and interior achitecture also in Italy.

In 1992 I returned to Germany and studied at the „Kunstakademie“ from 1997 untill 2003 with Georg Herold. I work and live in Düsseldorf.

Lorenzo Pompa, Düsseldorf, den 8. November 2015