R.I.P. – Really Interesting People
190 x 150 cm each, oil on raw linen, since 2009.
“At the end of February, the portrait of Jan, an old painter friend, came into being. Now, after his death, she paints him. In his face, the passage from this world is perhaps most intensely visible. His physical presence is slowly fading. It is as if, with one eye still slightly open, he casts a final, critical glance at this world. The other half of his face has sunken and grown heavy, already only a shell.”
– Dorothe Freiburghaus
The series R.I.P. (really interesting people) portrays all the people – friends, family, relatives – I ever knew who have died. Death had different causes: sleep, illness, suicide, an accident.
The color black portrays the absence, summation, negation or synthesis of all and other colors.
These ‚memento mori‘ probe my memories of these persons through the absence of, as well as the interplay between, the painted forms, the black forms and the raw linen background (empty space = lost/ forgotten memories).
Black is like a feeling of going inside something, like confronting fear… When you are making something, it feels really alive; but when this process of making is finished, it’s finished. It does have something to do with death…that’s why you keep making more work…
– Chohreh Feyzdjou (Künstlerin, 1955 – 1996)
The R.I.P.s are
Ersoy Altiok († ca. 1998)
Jan Balet (1913–2009)
Deanna Dooly (1970–1983) & Valentine (†1983)
Paul Elias-Toulakany (?)
Max Gygax (1916–2007)
Erika Jakob (1917–2000)
Johann Jakob (1921–1996)
Alexander Magaña (1940–1997)
Eugenie Magaña de Ford (1917–2007)
Raoul D. Magaña (1911–2007)
Bruno Manser (1954 – verschollen seit 2000)
Claudia Meier (1968–1997)
Ruth Nievergelt (1951–1999)
Jacqueline Rotzler (1965–2008)
Frau Tschiemer (†1995)
Gabriella Tschiemer-Ross (†2006)
