Master Copies – the Allreadymades

Copying the works of Old Masters has played an important role in the tradition of painting. At this moment, I use this fact as a starting point in Brickpainting, where the idea and concept of 'copying' fascinates me greatly.

Copying was an inevitable part of the learning process within the painters' guilds in the late Middle Ages, but even when the Academies began to replace the guilds in the 18th century, it remained a suitable educational tool for a long time. When Modernism and Postmodernism turned the Western art tradition upside down in the 20th century, 'the copying of art' as an issue was also not left unscathed. Starting with Picasso's 'collages', almost immediately followed by Duchamp's 'readymades', up to the sampling, using, and reusing of mass-produced products and images by artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons, Hirst, Dumas, Ai Weiwei, Kehinde Wiley, Yiadom-Boakye.
Now that technology replaces a large part of the skills we are used to assigning to craftsmanship, almost everyone feels encouraged to be 'an artist'. Although the line between 'artist' and 'maker', and 'original' and 'copy' is becoming more and more blurred, the fascination for craftsmanship is still alive.

My exploration of 'The Allreadymades' touches on these dilemmas, precisely by working with a mass-produced product where form and color are fixed. When you buy a Lego set, you are actually buying a 'copy' of a non-existent 'original', or better said, you are buying a design that you can (re)produce with the help of a manual. The product itself has no 'original' characteristics (nor pretensions) because it contains no properties that allow 'the handwriting of the individual'. Perhaps that cannot be either. Or can it? What happens when you take the medium as an occasion to make an 'original copy' of an original? What form of 'communication' arises when a strictly individualistic and unique work is translated into a medium that precisely lacks those personal characteristics? What can the artist still add to that translation? What aspects of craftsmanship must you master to be able to add something 'unique' to it at all? And what perspectives does it provide the viewer to view, compare, and calibrate both works?

In essence, this is what I am investigating with 'the Allreadymades.' I use fragments of existing artworks as an occasion to create a Lego-translated artwork from it, a so-called 'Brickpainting.' The approach and process are similar to painting, but due to the nature of the medium and because this in this form is still uncharted territory, there is still much to discover and explore. That makes it exciting for an artist and hopefully makes that quest (and its outcomes) exciting for a viewer as well.