Johannes Kahrs
Johannes Kahrs’s large-scale canvases take their imagery from popular media: press photos, newsreel and film stills. Presented without context of their origin, Kahrs’s paintings merge the banal and horrific, as his generic subjects become monumentalised and frozen in non-sequential time. Rendered with flawless technique, Kahr’s highly realistic style captures the imperfect aesthetics of photography. Using the art historical, ‘high culture’ tradition of painting to transform the shadows of over exposure, the acid hues of print, or the ‘snow’ of tv, Kahrs displaces his familiar images, transforming the ‘disposable moments’ of media image bytes into disquieting portraits of contemporary zeitgeist.
Johannes Kahrs’s large-scale canvases take their imagery from popular media: press photos, newsreel and film stills. Presented without context of their origin, Kahrs’s paintings merge the banal and horrific, as his generic subjects become monumentalised and frozen in non-sequential time. Rendered with flawless technique, Kahr’s highly realistic style captures the imperfect aesthetics of photography. Using the art historical, ‘high culture’ tradition of painting to transform the shadows of over exposure, the acid hues of print, or the ‘snow’ of tv, Kahrs displaces his familiar images, transforming the ‘disposable moments’ of media image bytes into disquieting portraits of contemporary zeitgeist.
