The work of Johannes Kahrs (b. 1965) confronts the viewer with dark ensembles of the banal and the horrible: violence, rage and sexuality. The starting point for his work is formed by photographs and video and film stills, fragments from the news, history, politics and advertising, as well as from his own archives.
Images courtesy Zeno X Gallery Antwerp
Kahrs abstracts the images, deforms and re-forms them, strips them of their original contexts and makes the external image his own, in dark, suggestive and mysterious paintings.
Because Kahrs makes use of images from our collective visual memory, his primarily abstract depictions virtually immediately evoke a recognizable and uncomfortable feeling. Everything seems to point to the possibility of physical and psychological drama.