Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

54
Les Prairies's artists
THOMAS KILPPER
John Heartfield and Silvio Berlusconi, 2009. Collection Kadist Art Foundation, Paris.
© Adagp, Paris 2012.
Thomas Kilpper, the German artist and activist living in Berlin,
is well known for his installations, drawings and monumental
woodcarvings that he does on an urban architectural scale. He
takes over buildings due for demolition and carves directly into the
floor, which he uses as a matrix for making in situ prints on canvas
or paper. John Heartfield and Silvio Berlusconi provocatively
associates a portrait of Berlusconi, the former Italian head of
government and media mogul, with a fragment of a photomontage
by John Heartfield (1891-1968), in which this great German
manipulator of images and critic of the Nazi regime appears with a
pair of scissors. In Willi Brandt, Guenther Guillaume and Dietrich
Sperling, goes back to the intrigues of the Cold War. Guenter
Guillaume was an East German spy who had infiltrated the office
of the Chancellor of the Federal German Republic. Here he seems
to be whispering false information into Chancellor Willi Brandt's
ear. The third man, Dietrich Sperling, was at that time a minister in
Brandt's government. These two works are part of the series State
of Control, a monumental fresco in which the artist experimented
for the first time with engraving on a linoleum floor in a Berlin
building. In this case it was the former headquarters of the East
German political police, the STASI.
F. O. tr. J. H.
Born in 1956 in Stuttgart (Germany), lives and works in Berlin
(Germany).