Johan Schäfer

In the exhibition "Man ist ja keine 13 mehr” ('You're not 13 anymore'), Johan Schäfer presents his series bearing the same name. These are storage media and games consoles enlarged proportionally on canvas, which accompanied the artist until the early 1990s. The paintings fill the entire canvas with the depiction of the respective object, so that the canvas itself becomes the object. Through this process of appropriation, we encounter cassettes, consoles and controllers in a new guise, while at the same time they represent a relic from the past and are already partly unknown to younger generations. These works are complemented by the series "Floppy Games", which shows pirated floppy disks in large formats on canvas.

"Man ist ja keine 13 mehr” visually guides us through a media landscape on the threshold of increasing digitalization and raises fundamental questions about the art and media world: To what extent can we understand painted images or art in general as storage media? Is identity deconstructed or rather recreated through processes of copying, repetition and appropriation? And: Why do we save at all?