Michael Kutsche

The artist

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藝術家本人

With an idiosyncratic approach of pairing seemingly contradictory visual elements of centuries-spanning artistic movements as well as mythical creatures, historical figures and pop culture elements, Michael Kutsche creates evocative paintings and animations that feel at once like fragments of anachronistic fairytales but also raise questions about the human condition and nostalgia, and ultimately force us to view past and present from a new angle.

His new work fragMental features elements from his previous works, such as the child-like characters that inhabit surreal spaces which are reminiscent of natural history museum dioramas but also elements which are subtle hints that these aren't real places, but rather a kind of digital afterlife or virtual reality.

The children seem to be symbolic for the child-like wonder and curiosity as we approach the new frontiers of the Metaverse, but the often slightly twisted fairytale-like beings who also roam these spaces are adding to a foreboding and mysterious atmosphere, and give reason to read these recurring pictorial arrangements as contemporary cautionary tales, and that to all this indulgence and promise of new technology and progress there is a tradeoff.

The large female figure that almost fills the entire frame evokes memories of the famous eat me cake-scene in Alice in Wonderland, and the rabbit hole analogy is also fitting with regards to the mysterious and highly contagious world of Web3 that seems to work by its very own set of rules. One other thing that stands out is that the girl seems to be a patchwork of different elements, and just like most of the figures in the work of the artist she is devoid of a face, as if to express that the further we move down that rabbit hole of social media and Web3 anonymity, the more fragmented our identities become.

One of the inspirations of the image is the enigmatic final scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, of which the chair to the right of the moving painting was taken. It is no coincidence that the film's main theme is also a cautionary tale: It points at Pandora's box that artificial intelligence embodies, personified by the sentient control system Hal that spins out of control, and with AI applications currently evolving at unprecedented speed, the art fits right into the current Zeitgeist.