Produced in conjunction with Matthias Groebel’s debut solo exhibition in the UK, present phantoms all around me.

Groebel had been producing machine-assisted paintings since the late 1980s, continuously refining and improving his infamous painting machine. Assembled from scrap metal, one could visualise the machine as a kind of airbrush attached to a plotter, moving in layers across a canvas providing precise control over the application of acrylic paint. By the turn of the millennium, Groebel, who until then had been capturing images from broadcast television in his paintings, had grown weary of the increasingly manicured studio productions that were taking over German television. Dissatisfied with the loss of the raw, authentic portrayal of the human condition, he turned to the city. Armed with a portable consumer camera and a stereographic filter, he wandered the streets of his native Cologne, London and New York. Groebel would then isolate singular frames from the hours of recorded footage, selecting images that had burned themselves into his memory, to transfer onto canvas.

Text by Dara Jochum