Falkenrot Prize 2006

Maik Wolf’s subliminally disturbing painting is a seductive attack on media gullibility. Demonstrating great virtuosity, his pictures cite the repertoire of glossy photography. His backgrounds are the very same sunsets and night-time atmospheres with which modern reporting even guarantees the advantageous journalistic use of crisis zones. Wolf radicalises this aesthetic exploitation of the banal until his works become visual puzzles reflecting our faith in images. He employs a fine painting technique, which sometimes appears to have been merely wafted onto the canvas, to lend suburbia and its local bank buildings, for example, an almost old-masterly artistic dignity. These pictures are always filled with quotations from and references to art history. But above all, they pose the fundamental question as to painting’s possibilities in a media world that can be manipulated – and thereby attack the aestheticism of commercial photography.