ARE BLYTT
FIVE BOOKS FROM MY STUDIO TABLE
Lennart Nilsson. A Child is Born.
Sylvie Eyberg / Valerie Mannaerts. La Biennale Di Venezia 2003.
Masahisa Fukase. Ravens.
Mark McKnight. Heaven is a Prison.
Ed Atkins. Get Life/Love’s Work.
On the question on my interest in photography from a previous interview:
Photography is a beautiful way of capturing life and moments in time. I admire photographers that concentrate, observe and wait for the moment. I am not a big fan of the digital-post-production-and-photoshop-school or the possibility of doing hundreds of photos in a minute. I like the photo to work when taken in a single shot, or not to work and then be trashed. Maybe like a canvas? I very seldom crop or anything like that. Either it works or not. To deal with life through observation is a space that feels to me as an important counterweight to academic thinking.
Photography, both found material and my own, has been a part of my paintings for some time, as paper collages, printed with silk screen or painted on the canvas. I was accepted to art school with painting and photography, both mediums were a mix between abstract and ‘life’, but there was no encouragement to continue photography, so for many years this has been something I did for myself and my personal archive. 2019 was the first time I showed framed photographs together with paintings at Galerie Alber in Cologne. I feel that within contemporary photography there are still unlocked doors to enter or new areas to explore, maybe even more so than in contemporary painting...
From The benefits of bankruptcy, Weinspach, 2020, Interview by Tom Lingnau.