Mandalas

The woodcut series Mandalas refers to inflation stamps used during and after the First World War: unbelievable sums of money were printed on the stamps. Utzni adopts these images and at the same time manages to abstract them by not depicting any postal symbols or terms like Deutsches Reich and enlarging the images to 49 × 42 centimeters. The artist is taking pictures from our collective memory and transports them into the present. Being modified and set in a new context, they create new connections — to the recent crises in Europe for example. This transformation is also reflected in the media used — woodcuts for the backgrounds and stencils for acrylics for the numbers and letters — that seem to be in opposition: While it needs precise and slow work to do the woodcuts, the stencils enable a quick transfer.

Press release © Galerie Bernard Jordan, 2012