Hans in Transition: Paintings by Hans Scheirl

Transition
110A Lauriston Road, London E9 7HA
020 8533 7843 / 07941 208566 transition@huntergather.com www.transitiongallery.co.uk

Hans in Transition: Paintings by Hans Scheirl

Sep 11- Oct 10 2004, Fri-Sun 1-6pm
Free Admission

Private View Friday Sep 10 6-9pm

“I took up painting in 1995 when the work on Dandy Dust, my last movie, ground down to a halt, yet again, due to a lack of funding. Like a manic I started to draw and paint figures, 'hermaphroditic mutants' I call them retrospectively.

1995 was the year the dragking scene lifted off with Club Naive at Maximus on Leicester Square and later at Madame Jo-Jos in Soho. I won the dragking competition at the National Film Theatre with a special-effect performance of suicide [+ erection] by hanging. In Los Angeles the photographer Catherine Opie helped me to create the 'dirty old man' persona with a fat grey moustache. I started injecting testosterone in 1996 - as an experiment.

For Hans in Transition I plan to create a dynamic between self-portraits from that time and my new work, which is more abstract, more graphic design and comix inspired.

Staging myself as a man and staging myself as a painter is juxtaposed with the splitting up of the idea of 'self' into many trans-human hybrid creatures: animal-bits, plant-bits, a bomb, trans-portation vehicles are coupling with re/productive organs: genitals, intestines, uterus, balls, a mouth, coupling with paint, gesture, surface, flatness, the frame, the hanging on the wall.

Identity is the dynamic between all the relationships. And as it is a movement and not a thing it is shown to always have a relationship to its own death, loss and becoming something else. That's why I like to play with the idea of 's/hit!' [=she+he+it], the hermaphroditic trans-human agency for trans-formation, the colour brown as a metaphor for mixing as well as the actual outcome of mixing the 3 primary colours.”

Hans Scheirl, August 2004