Johannes Kahrs
The German artist Johannes Kahrs is best known for transforming found images into enigmatic and evocative figurative paintings and drawings. As a starting point, Kahrs uses photos culled from mass media, advertisements, film stills, and sometimes images from his own photographic archive. Through the use of various pictorial treatments including shifting tones, blurring, cropping, repositioning, fragmenting and erasing, Kahrs abstracts and ambiguates his subjects, while echoes of the original source image remain visible. Disassociated from their original context, and placed under heavy glazing creating a visual interference, any explicit meaning or narrative connected with each subject is suspended - the viewer is left guessing about what exactly is being portrayed and why. In the charcoal and pastel drawing Untitled (boy with uniform) (2007), Kahrs isolates the image of a small nervous boy with eyes raised and hands cusped together. On his clothing appears an eight-pointed Star of David. Although there is no color in Kahrs' image, the textile symbol and its placement recalls the stigmatizing yellow patch that Jews had to wear under Nazi occupation.
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