Charcoal on discarded 1960s RCA silkscreen prints
These works began with a group of ‘reclaimed ‘ 1960s RCA silkscreen prints, rescued from the dustbin of history just as they were being discarded and erased from the artists carefully curated mythology.
Onto their immaculate geometric surfaces I drew, in Childs wax crayon, the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber associated with the bombing of Guernica.
This intervention brings two different histories into collision: the formal autonomy and flatness of post-war abstraction and the historical image of a machine designed not only to destroy but to terrorise.
The Stuka is made to appear to pass through the surface. History does not simply arrive as subject matter; it reorganises the space of the image.
The discarded silk screens become historical material in both senses of the term: fragments retrieved from the dustbin of one history and brought into a new constellation with another.
The Stuka dives back through Modernism’s highest point.
