Untitled (196L) is a picture from 2015 which was part of my exhibition Hoap of a Tree in the Juana de Aizpuru Gallery. While working on the paintings for that exhibition I was immersed in reading Riddley Walker, a novel by Russel Hoban written in an invented language close to English, and I was deeply interested in the different strategies that enable trees to survive, which somehow affected my way of approaching my work. On the other hand, this particular painting derives from a model I made of an area of the sadly famous island of Utøya, where Anders Breivik committed a mass shooting in 2011.
I wonder whether the novel and what happened on the island have a particular smell in common. And if so, do they smell the same to the collector?
Philipp Fröhlich