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By Lutz Worat |
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No, he doesn’t go in for mere story telling: and yet his pictures speak volumes. With brilliant techniques and a vigilant eye Sebastian Kruger sets about taking swipes at the celebrities of this world. Pinching their cheeks and compressing their foreheads – until finally the subject, whether it is megastar Madonna or media baron Berlusconi, appears distorted into a most astonishing degree of recognisability. |
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Having made a profession out of taking apart the features of his contemporaries, the young artist, who was born in the Lower Saxony town of Hamelin in 1963, has attained to a certain degree of celebrity and fame himself. His works have graced the covers of high-circulation magazines from the German Spiegal to the Italian L’Espresso – all of them hitting their targets with uncommon precision and with the unmistakable Kruger penstroke. |
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But simply executing these bold caricatures to earn his bread and butter is far from being enough to satisfy Kruger. In the rural seclusion of his studio outside Hanover he sets to work on the heads of people with whom he feels a personal affinity: poets such as Bukowski and Burroughs, actors such as Jack Nicholson and again and again the members of the Rolling Stones, who have been friends of his for years. |
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| In these works that spring from his own inclinations, Kruger often goes beyond the genre of the satirical caricature, digging far deeper without sparing either then person portrayed for the observer. In his portrait of the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, for instance, the folds, wrinkles and scars, all executed in minute detail, come to constitute a map of a tragic life: his “Joseph Bueuys in Blue” (1993) depicts the avant-garde weird shaman, but at the same time as a figure tortured by secret fears and neuroses. |
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| Before Kruger starts work he obtains comprehensive photographic and film material on his subjects, and works his way through studies, biographies, gramophone records, books: “ I am a hunter and gatherer.” he says . “Only when I have managed to get a feeling for a person, when he speaks to me, can I draw him.” |
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| Does he then consider himself to be a kind of paparazzo of of physiognomy, with license to tear the veil from even the most intimate maters, in the public interest? – Certainly not; although: “I take the liberty of going a very long way. I could imagine, for example painting a Michael Jackson overtaken by the consequences of his innumerable cosmetic operations. That would certainly be quite a powerful thing.” A Pause, and then: “his music doesn’t do anything for me, but I am sorry for him. What a dreadful tale of woe. |
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| A new book of Sebastian Kruger’s pictures will shortly be appearing. And after the great success of his exhibition in the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover a further exhibition is under discussion – in Ireland together with Kruger’s pal Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, who is also achieving success as a painter. The provisional title: “Double in Dublin”. |
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