Skin-paintings — EN

Origin and Motivation

The skin paintings emerged from an intense, almost staring way of looking. In old paintings, flesh tones appear as a mysterious paint layer: paint made flesh. Gripped by this, the gaze turned toward the body itself, toward skin as the boundary between inside and outside. One’s own vulnerable wrist: thin skin, almost translucent.

Touch also plays a part: the memory of a mother’s skin, the safety of first physical contact as a child. Later, one’s own child entered the picture: unbroken skin as a mirror of vulnerability and beginning. From that intimate, bodily starting point arose the desire to let skin itself appear as painting—an image that does not depict something, but is something.

What it is

These works are referred to as skin monochromes or skin paintings: monochrome paintings that appear as an isolated “skin.” The work does not behave like a window or an image, but as a frontal surface, in which skin manifests as pure presence. Human scale is decisive here; the upright, body-related proportions evoke a sense of the human and confront the viewer with the “other” at eye level. This object-like presence means the painting functions not only as an image, but also as a physical presence in space.

Visual elements

Each work shows one dominant monochrome tonal field that clearly associates with skin colour. This variation functions like a kind of portrait: some works are “chubby” and full, others tighter and flatter; in some, distinct veins are visible, while others show a “perfect skin.” The colour spectrum of skin extends from sallow yellow to blushing pink and red—warm tones with every nuance in between—interspersed with cool grey, blue-green. Skin topography becomes visible in microstructures that read as pores, veining and marks, where rippling, tension and thickening converge. The monochrome is deliberately not perfectly flat: it is not sterile, but shows “accident,” unrest and irregularity. The work also produces a subtle convex impression, as though light bulges like a body instead of remaining purely planar. The painting seems to bulge into physical space and “senses” the viewer as a sensorial organ. This aura further intensifies the skin association.

Material, support, and object construction

The base is canvas on a stretcher frame: the classical painting support, used here as anatomical tension. The skin painting becomes a construction in which the stretched surface refers to a bodily logic: the framework as skeleton, the skin as envelope. What is looked at is the paint-skin—with beneath it the suggestion of a hidden corporeality, as if the work resonates like a living organism. Multiple transparent layers build the painting and strengthen the skin illusion of slight translucency. The support may be traditional canvas, but also chamois or leather; in a number of skin paintings, imitation and synthetic leather materials are also used, such as skai, shammy, or imitation leather. Finish and materiality shift the work toward tactility, so that the painting oscillates between pictorial surface and sculptural object.

Field of meaning

The skin paintings investigate the pre-representation, the threshold before the image: skin or membrane functions as a sensory condition for perception, even before recognition, interpretation or narrative. They do not zoom in on a depicted scene, but on the moment just before depiction can arise. Imaging happens outside the painting: the painting is not a carrier of a scene, but a membrane or screen, and what becomes “image” unfolds as perception and projection in the viewer and in the space around the object—not as representation within the plane. They aim to operate at the level of sensation before meaning, in experience rather than narrative. Meaning arises because perception triggers associations through projection and memory, and is therefore never unambiguous.

Continuum

The skin monochrome offers a field of meaning: a zone where light “lands” and matter “imprints,” where itch and tickle, health and illness, pain and pleasure, shame and arousal, fear and pallor—up to and including death—can resonate without being depicted. Skin functions as boundary and contact surface, where inside and outside, protection and vulnerability, contact and distance converge. Skin is even understood as a cosmic boundary: it marks the transition between two infinities—the infinite space around the body enclosed by skin, and the infinite inner world of feeling that is bounded by that same skin and, at the same time, made accessible through it. Yet that boundary is not absolute but a continuum: the experience of separation between inside and outside is in part a sensory construction.

Skin as spectrum

Not origin, race, or a category stands at the centre, but one’s own skin colour as experience: a changeable matter that is at once physical and emotional. Starting from direct lived experience, skin colour in that sense encompasses “all colours” as a spectrum—as mixing, completion and totality—because skin continuously responds to light, temperature, touch, tension, shame, arousal, fear, fatigue or illness. From that intimate starting point, the work then shifts from individual to mass: from body to society, from the small to the large. In that movement, concepts such as identity, nationhood, and media also come into view: how the personal is read as collective, how skin becomes image, and how images of skin circulate and set norms. The theme thus refers not only to the newborn, the unassailable and the virginal-untouchable, but also to age, virus, illness and mortality—and, further away yet unavoidably connected, to war and nation-building.

Effect on the viewer

The skin paintings offer representation without depiction: it is painting, but the imaging remains at the threshold by showing no scene—only a state. This mode of appearing attracts and repels; you want to lean against it, to touch it. It looks soft, inviting, tactile. It is the mother, the mother-skin. But the intimacy of skin at too close a distance combines with a fundamental discomfort. The skin looks marked, with a sensation of “apparent violence,” and gives the impression of being “stretched tight,” which evokes the perception of intervention (incision). The work thus becomes both looking back and feeling back: it “senses” the presence of the viewer and behaves like a kindred being, yet at the same time as something uncanny (unheimlich).

Monochromy and the language of reduction

Monochromy is the core strategy of the skin paintings: a reduction of pictorial means to a single field. This monochrome functions as enveloping skin and as screen—not only as a stylistic choice but as a conceptual principle. There is an affinity with reductive and minimalist logic, in which monochromy and repetition or seriality are key means, yet the charge here is different: bodily, ethical and emotionally loaded. In the background, the square or upright standard format also plays a role: this modernist measure evokes thoughts of geometric order and rational consciousness, though it is here immediately confronted with the irrational and bodily nature of skin.

Cultural and historical backgrounds

The skin paintings are deeply anchored in both cultural and historical layers of meaning. Culturally, they refer not only to human existence, but also to self-image and identification. Skin is not able to conceal the emotional inner world; through its transparency, a state of mind becomes visible. That is why we wear clothing: not only to protect against cold and as an expression of belonging to a group, but also to shield emotional vulnerability.

A heavy historical shadow rests on these skin paintings: the association with Nazi “lampshades” made from human skin functions as an uncanny reference. At the same time, a clashing contemporary reference enters the work: “IKEA art above the sofa,” the handy format and decorative consumer culture. This combination operates as a cynical double bottom or a “sick joke”: aesthetic seduction collides with historical horror, and that tension is not resolved. A skin painting can, after all, hang safely in a living room as a pleasant, pinkish monochrome, while simultaneously carrying that horrific echo—indeed, its apparent innocence makes the perversity of the doubleness all the sharper.

Art-historical context

The relationship to the monochrome as a phenomenon in 20th-century visual art is direct: as a basic form, the monochrome opens questions about image and meaning, about the effect of a single colour, and about material, support and act. Malevich’s Black Square serves here as an iconic anchor: the monochrome appears as an absolute field, a “screen” that confronts the eye frontally with perception, afterimage and projection—precisely because representation and narrative are pared back. Rodchenko provides the modernist backdrop, in which the (early) monochrome as a radical choice marks a position. Ryman’s White Square then functions as a reference point within monochrome practice, with emphasis on materiality, seriality and the painting as object. In the broader context, awareness remains that monochrome art can also be read ideologically and misused; the work therefore stays sharply attentive to that tension.

PTP framework: Pressure, Temperature, Pain

Within the senses of the skin, three separate systems are distinguished—pressure, temperature and pain—each leading to different phenomenological experiences. Around the skin paintings, other derivatives and series have emerged that find their place and meaning within the PTP construction. PTP thus functions as an interpretive grid that links the skin surface to sense, emotion and context. As physical skin reality, Pressure refers to pressure on or against the surface, to tension and compression; Temperature to warmth and cold as sensation and atmosphere; Pain to pain as a signal of body and boundary. At the same time, PTP offers a psychological and socio-political translation: Pressure becomes stress, coercion, ideology and social pressure; Temperature becomes mood, affect and atmosphere; Pain becomes trauma, loss and historical burden.

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Motif list: anchor words

Mother and child. Painting as body, in which the stretcher frame corresponds to skeleton and skin to surface. Stretched tight, leather, intervention and scars. Degree of gloss, convexity and tactility. Monochrome as screen and as envelope. Attraction and repulsion. Looking back and the viewer’s presence. Abstraction versus radical corporeality. Projection and memory, in which meaning manifests as an unstable field. Individual versus mass, personal versus collective. Auschwitz lampshade versus IKEA interior design. PTP: pressure, temperature and pain, both physical and psychological.

"I also saw the skin-painting as closely related to Malevich’s Black Square, which struck me as a closed eye—a mystical sleep, blind, where other senses take over. And I imagined that if the eye were to open, it would become a sensitive membrane: an awakened, open eye, receptive to every possible image."