Johannes Kahrs makes dangerous pictures. Born in 1965 in Bremen, the artist takes possession of images he finds and reworks them into paintings, drawings, video films and installations, unleashing a confrontation with the flow of visual impressions that uninterruptedly surge through our heads. His work provokes painful dissonance and ruptures our sense of calm.

This publication, Down ’n out, presents his varied confabulations in pastel drawings – the monumental motif of Man Asleep from Murnau’s Nosferatu that Kahrs has menacingly insinuated into the margins of a European metropolis, or the fossilized icon of Willy Brandt made a component of a site-specific installation. Elsewhere, Ulrike Meinhof is caught in an aggressive pose, an image that has stimulated widespread debate about the nature of Kahrs’ work.

“Each of the images [by Johannes Kahrs] is permeated through and through with allusions to possible sources and references...and given their unpredictable and fragmentary nature, he offers us something quite unique. His narrative style makes us aware of the fact that all the images we see have been relentlessly filtered by other images and that it is entirely up to us to live.” (João Fernandes)

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In collaboration with Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin