Florian Waldvogel – författare

A wide-ranging exploration of comics, characters, and the visual language of KAWS and his contemporaries.KAWS. Art & Comics explores the interplay between comics, comic strips, cartoons, and fine art. It places the American artist KAWS in dialog with selected contemporary stances, focusing on the artistic autonomy of his characters—figures that unite characteristics of street, pop, commercial, and public art. Comics are characterized by a universal language and exist in many cultures as an accessible way of telling stories graphically, in words and images. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ad Reinhardt were fine artists who created comics in a near-classic vein. Even before the advent of photography and (animated) films, caricature, satire, and frame-by-frame narration offered a powerful way to convey stories across national, generational, and social boundaries.From the 1960s onward, artists such as Keith Haring and H.C. Westermann questioned the division between high and low art. Prominent contemporary artists in this tradition include KAWS, Joyce Pensato, Cosima von Bonin, and Peter Saul. KAWS began as a graffiti artist in the 1990s, later overpainting posters and advertisements in public spaces by obscuring faces with a stylized skull and crossbones.He is known for monumental figurative sculptures in bronze, wood, and inflatables. His COMPANIONs and ACCOMPLICEs display a range of emotional states, often isolated and melancholy.

The facelessness of the protagonists in Josef Zekoff’ s paintings is one of their most distinctive features. From emblematic labyrinths – he does also paint ornaments and maps – to drawn stick figures, the in-between space occupied by these paintings encourages self-reflection, which does, however, require courage on the part of the viewer. Or as Florian Waldvogel writes in his introductory text: » Do the protagonists of his paintings seek an encounter with something that goes beyond the world of objects and fixed quantities? Is it, as Martin Heidegger writes in › What is Metaphysics?‹ , about an encounter with the › nothing‹ within › dread‹ ? Does the confrontation with › nothing‹ in Zekoff’ s paintings refer to our fear in the face of the original meaninglessness of the world, to the fact that it is existence that ascribes meanings to things?« The worldliness of the world, according to Heidegger, lies in this emptiness, and Zekoff’ s figures, unlike the viewers, do not dread nothingness. But as in Jacobean tragedy, fear needs the awareness of loss in order to survive. According to Marcel Proust, Florian Waldvogel concludes, the true paradises are those that have been lost.

Between 2001 and 2002, a VW bus bearing the inscription "Lufthansa Deportation Class" was on display in various German cities. It was part of the provocative bürgersteig action by Silke Wagner (born 1968, lives in Frankfurt) about Lufthansa providing aircraft for deportation purposes.The bus sparked heated debates and became a vehicle for activist networking and communication among citizens. The participatory art project was groundbreaking at the time in its collaboration with civil justice initiatives. This book documents bürgersteig for the first time with all its aspects, disclosing the sources for the action as well as material on the legal conflicts that followed the project.