In her current pictures, Ellen Semen addresses the frightening mass cultural permanent mobilization of war
.
Normal violence
The war rages in our living rooms. The globalization of horror is visualized at prime time - in the middle of the family idyll and yet so far away. Battered and destroyed bodies are part of television reality and become an accepted part of everyday life thanks to the exaggerated staging of the news. What is more real: images from the Iraq war of people and houses caught in the crosshairs or childishly drawn comic and computer figures shooting their way out with a utopian, exaggerated weapon in their hands? Violence sells, violence is "in".
Warlike mass culture
Ellen Semen's images are based on this perverted cooperation between playful innocence and real-life horror. They juxtapose the harmless with the horrific, seemingly without comment. Alienation in the form of artificial manga figures designed according to market economy criteria is juxtaposed with direct realism in the form of collaged or realistically reproduced images from photo reportages. The artificial staging suddenly tips over into the horrific, the naive into the catastrophic. Ellen Semen's images fit in with a media critique that warns of the horror of a society ready for war.
The wonderfully horrific pictures by the Hamburg-born, Vienna-based artist can be seen at Galerie Ernst Hilger. On an exhibition space of over 350 m2, the gallery presents a program ranging from classical modernism to contemporary international and Austrian art in up to nine exhibitions and numerous events.
Plain normal violence
The main theme in Ellen Semen's (born in Hamburg and living in Vienna) current paintings is the alarming permanent flaunting of war related topics in today's mass culture. Here trivial is set next to
the atrocious. The estrangement in the form of artificially designed manga-figures stands next to realism expressed in the form of collages or realistic reproduced afterimages from photo reportages.
These wonderful horrid paintings can be viewed in the Gallery Ernst Hilger.
Gallery Ernst Hilger
Dorotheergasse 5, 1010 Vienna
Tel.: +43-(0)1-512 53 15
Fax: +43-(0)1-513 91 26
Email: ernst.hilger@hilger.at
www.hilger.at, www.contemporary.at
Opening hours: Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 10am-4pm