Doktor Faustus

Axel Linderholm

February 01 – May 30 2010, W139

Doktor Faustus

Axel Linderholm participated in group exhibition Doktor Faustus at W139 (NL, 2010). It was part of the farewell exhibition of director Gijs Frieling:

Doktor Faustus \\ Doctor Faustus

“It’s not my job to have ideas – that’s better left to others; I read books by poets and philosophers, see images and that’s what I draw and paint.

From Monday 1 February until Friday 2 April the walls of W139 will be painted with scenes, images and characters from Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus.

A novel of great complexity, Doctor Faustus is also a treatise on how art and, with it, the artist, has become autonomous. How it broke away from religious and collective bounds to become a domain accessible only to the isolated individual and how, in this state of permanent self-reflection, erodes the artist’s creative powers.

Painting W139 from head to toe

Various strands of my curatorship and artistic practice converge in this plan: the wish to paint W139 from head to toe at least once; the wish to be instrumental in a collaboration between different artists who transcend the obligatory reference to a shared theme and the endeavour to vanquish the wondrous fear of illustration that has held the visual arts captive for over a century.”

Gijs Frieling