Eike König

Eike König knows to combine design, text and image elements of our pop culture in an intelligent and humorous way. The omnipresence of capitalist structures and (digital) information flows not only changes our reception behavior, but also artistic production: Thus, a clearly decipherable symbolic language is increasingly replaced by a simultaneous, pictorial perception, resulting in a multitude of open interpretive spaces. König's art aims precisely at this kind of openness. He analyzes and tests the interaction of word and image, drawing attention to the power of communication mechanisms and their altered effectiveness depending on their contextualization.

In his current solo exhibition, "PREVENTING PEOPLE FROM SINKING INTO CONFUSION AND DISPAIR", König presents nine cotton blankets created using a digital knitting machine. They show figures from children's series, each in four colors as well as combined with text. For this, König first made oil paintings, which he photographed and then digitally processed. The ceilings, some of which are installed in the middle of the room, appear almost as if they have been removed from the digital universe due to their reduced colorfulness and knitting technique, despite their haptic and expansive material. Due to the text passages, the series characters suddenly have absurd new levels of meaning. König, for example, links Biene Maja's friend Willi with a quote from a Mafia boss from the series "The Sopranos".

Eike König, who lives in Berlin, is both an artist and a professor of illustration and graphic design at the HfG Offenbach. In 1994 he founded Studio HORT in Frankfurt, which he moved to Berlin in 2007. Initially working for the music industry, it has evolved into a multidisciplinary design studio that works internationally for such clients as Nike, Universal Music, The New York Times, Volkswagen and IBM.