Germán Gómez

Germán Gómez

Serie Retratos
2020/21, Fotografie und Collage, 100 x 70 cm
Serie Retratos
2020/21, Fotografie und Collage, 100 x 70 cm
Still Life with Self-Portrait, Raúl, Rings, and Flowers in an 18th Century Frame, 2023
Serie: “Still Lifes” C-Print auf Papier, Polyethylen, Japanpapier, 50 x 40 cm
Still Life of a Flower in a 19th Century Frame, 2023
Serie: “Still Lifes” C-Print auf Papier, Polyethylen, Japanpapier, 30 x 40 cm
Still Life of a Flower in a Renaissance Frame, 2023
Serie: “Still Lifes” C-Print auf Papier, Polyethylen, Japanpapier, 30 x 40 cm
Still Life with Paintbrush Jars in a 16th Century Frame, 2023
Serie: “Still Lifes” C-Print auf Papier, Polyethylen, Japanpapier, 40 x 50 cm
Still Life with Books, Art Notes and Cheat Sheets in a Dutch Frame, 2023
Serie: “Still Lifes” C-Print auf Papier, Polyethylen, Japanpapier, 70 x 50 cm
Serie Retratos
2020/21, Fotografie und Collage, 110 x 110 cm
Serie Retratos
2020/21, Fotografie und Collage, 100 x 70 cm
Serie Retratos
2020/21, Fotografie und Collage, 100 x 70 cm
Serie Retratos
2020/21, Fotografie und Collage, 100 x 70 cm

Biography

Germán Gómez was born in 1972 in Gijón, Spain, and lives and works in Madrid, where he also studied at the Complutense University. He completed his studies with a Master's degree. He has been recognized internationally in numerous important exhibitions in Europe, Asia, the USA and Latin America, and has won a number of important art prizes. His work is part of a tradition of "sewn photographs" founded by the German artist Annegret Soltau, who has been producing them in different variations since 1975 and which Andy Warhol also took up in the 1980s. However, despite some similarities, all three artists are different in their approach.

While Soltau incorporates physical processes into the images in order to connect body and mind as equals and to add something haptic and textile to the photographic medium, Warhol focuses on defining the textile technique as a metaphor for connection and context. Germán Gómez is the most advanced in this further development of the collage and assemblage technique. For him, the stitching is an affirmation of the individual and the unique. Each work is unique, even though it is based on reproduced elements. He always treats the male figure as a full-length nude from behind or as a profile portrait of the head. Usually conceived in shifted duplications or repaired fragmentarizations, the sewing ensures the re-integration of the body. Sometimes the tears remain more visible, as in the series "De padres y de hijos" (Of fathers and sons), sometimes the seams are more prominent, sometimes an almost integral surface is created, as in some works of the "Condenado" series (The damned).

The latter is influenced by Michelangelo's ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel. However, Michelangelo's figures serve narrative purposes; in Gómez's work, they become life-size individuals who bear witness to the injuries caused by modern life. But we can also think of the "patchwork" identity (Heiner Keupp) of contemporary man. Identity, also in the sense of authenticity and originality, has already been questioned by Goethe (Zahme Xenien, 1797: "Vom Vater hab ich die Statur ...") and continues to be questioned today in the absence of a central identity-forming force. Art itself can, and this function also plays a role here, be activated to create its own identity.

The fanning out of faces, for example, naturally also brings up for discussion the complexity of human drives, lifted in the metaphor of the face as a mirror of the soul. And in Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Dorian Gray", with which Gómez's faces have a great deal to do. However, the Dorian Grays in Gómez's work are unknown to the viewer, and they remain so. But in the traces on their faces, they all touch the underlying, identical deep structure.