Using the mercurial city streets of Y2K-era East London as a source of inspiration, Cologne-based artist Matthias Groebel’s haunting collection of canvases, whose subjects are captured by a video camera, are painted by a machine built by the artist from scrap metal. Innovative and somewhat perplexing, Groebel’s process is like the work itself; a tortuous harmony between the unconscious and the uncanny.
We attended the private view on 14 March and asked the audience, what’s your hot take?
HOT TAKE 1: I really like the work and think it’s very London-centric. I can tell that maybe he’s not from here.
HOT TAKE 2: I recognise this building in the images, it’s very of-the-time. [The building] used to be in Whitechapel in the 90s and early 2000s…it was kind of a halfway house-ish for homeless people, and also run as a bit of a squat. Then it was renovated in the 2000s into luxury apartments and he has captured this moment in time just before that happened, when London kind of commercialised itself.
HOT TAKE 3: It’s an interesting question of what does London look like? London looks very different depending on your geography, your status. Sometimes walking around London I think, wow, I forget that this is also how London looks.
I’m Swedish, and all the Swedish people who move to London, they move to West London. Like the Notting Hill that you see in the movies. Myself, I’m an artist and so we moved into the cheaper areas as opposed to being gentrified, and then in your everyday life you are getting kind of consumed by what you are seeing, what you are digesting, you know.
You end up unconsciously identifying with that. You become the London you live in.
HOT TAKE 4: I made them a long time ago. [Looking back at them now,] it makes me feel like I was right about living in a different time frame. Maybe not with the work itself, but with the ideas and how the painting functions on a different time frame. Not a timelessness, but a painting goes over decades.
HOT TAKE 5: I know his work very well, but I think it’s a pleasant surprise to see it here, nicely displayed, generously spaced out. It’s nicely put together in the sense that the individual paintings almost kind of reconstruct the notion of moving image.
When you see, for example, those three next to each other, there is that kind of sense. They come out of a moving image, but they really don’t reveal anything about the sequence.
HOT TAKE 6: I like the sort of uncanny valley situation. It’s like, are they photographs or not? Also the simplicity of it. I like a clean environment to look around and it didn’t feel overly full or overly busy so I could kind of see what I was seeing.
I liked seeing the drips of paint on the side of the canvas but then thinking, oh, no but it’s a photograph. It sort of plays tricks with your perception that way. It made me really have to look at it closely, and certainly more closely than I would have otherwise.
HOT TAKE 7: It’s interesting to me ’cause the whole digital printing thing, which I didn’t realise that it was that, I knew a couple of designers back in the day who did digital printing in the fashion world and it was kind of revolutionary. I’m talking 15 years ago.
I definitely feel like it is an accurate depiction of London. Multi-cultural and all of that. Scaffolding for sure.
HOT TAKE 8: I thought it was fucking sick. I thought it was all photos, but it’s not, it’s painting, but it’s also not painting. It’s basically a printer that prints paint. They guy made a printer that prints in CNYK, which is crazy shit. Mad cool, and also very interesting that it’s basically where we used to live. It’s basically Whitechapel.
HOT TAKE 9: I love the background of the work because of the process that he has put together. It’s such a zeitgeist moment for airbrush painting right now – such a sort of bandwagon that people are hopping onto.
He was a pharmacist and only discovered a few years ago and he’s 65 now. He’s been doing this for decades and decades. He built his own airbrush machine, coded it himself, got a mechanic, got an electrician, and has just been re-tuning this machine that only he has. Plotters are so available now, but he is still the only person who can do this style of CMYK layered airbrush painting, and without any award, any acclaim for decades.
He just does it, and does it, and does it. He’s so sweet as well, such like an unassuming guy. He He’s so lovely. He seems sort of surprised that this [success and acclaim] is happening, because he never did it for recognition. He did it because he just loves it and is kind of obsessed with the process and obsessed with machinery.
Originally he staged it off of the television that was on in the 90s after the fall of The Wall, and this kind of gritty aesthetic of that television, just like B-sides a flipping through these images. Then at the turn of the century it kind of all became taken over by Hollywood and commercialised and sort of shorn up and so he moved on to cityscapes in Whitechapel. Then the same thing happened to scene there, and it sort of pushes him around.
It’s not even about being ahead of the curve, he was painting what he found fascinating and then the world caught up with him.
HOT TAKE 10: Today I had a conversation with $@%^£, who’s curating a show in &(%”$ and the artist that he was with. I was like, you can come to see this show of Matthias Groebel, and they were like, “oh, but he does AI.” No- it’s before AI. Imagine early 2000s, when internet was still trying to do its thing. He was decades ahead of any of this technology! These were all done in 2003. We could barely connect to dial-up internet.
If you want to see anything that’s really poignant to the development of anything, go back ten years. Go back 15 years and see what’s here.
HOT TAKE 11: I love when you don’t market yourself, when you’re just an artist who does really fucking cool shit.
HOT TAKE 12: Thinking about when it was made it has so much more gravity than where we are right now, it’s insane. I think people are looking at it through the lens of 2024 and forgetting that he made this stuff twenty years ago. He had the peripheral to say, I’m going to create these generated images of this landscape that will never exist ever again.
HOT TAKE 13: It makes me think that he must also understand something about the present day that we won’t even comprehend for another few decades.
HOT TAKE 14: He created a kind of AI element to it, yes, but it’s also so much more than that. It just could never be recreated in the same way, which is why it’s really not enough to describe it in those terms. That’s what I think it so exciting about it.
HOT TAKE 15: I did research the artist before coming, but I didn’t know I would have such a response to the ways he has immortalised these streets.
I went around the show alone first, without speaking to anyone. It’s better to see a show first than walking in and having someone immediately tour you, because you take on what they’re saying about the work and it prevents you from sort of developing your own ideas.
Phantoms All Around Me is on view through 20 April, 2024 at Gathering
5 Warwick Street
London, W1B 5LU
more info here
