The Berlin artist Boris Eldagsen is showing a major retrospective in Pirmasens. The spectrum ranges from drawing to photography and video to AI-generated images. You can see, among others, Sandra Hülser and a number of lifelike people who never existed: created in the computer – and in the artist’s imagination.
With AI-generated images, Eldagsen becomes a shooting star
It’s not exactly obvious that a globally successful artist would hold his first retrospective in the Palatinate Forest. The Berliner Boris Eldagsen, who has become a shooting star in the last year and a half with AI-generated, photorealistic images, is now spreading his artistic career in Pirmasens – because he was born and grew up there, because his childhood friends asked him, and because he has an ironic has an ambivalent relationship to his origins.
“Pirmasens is built on a certain megalomania. “The Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt had his hunting ground here and said at some point: I want to build the third largest parade hall in the world here. I have my toy army and I have them march up and down and then I blow the flute,” he says .
Weird Pirmasens homage with Sandra Hülser is rejected by politicians
Eldagsen has long reminded this founding story of the plot of the legendary Werner Herzog film “Fitzcarraldo”. In it, Klaus Kinski embodies an obsessive man who wants to build an opera in the middle of the jungle at all costs.
A few years ago, Eldagsen wanted to re-stage the material in Pirmasens: “The idea was to do a remake with Sandra in the lead role, who plays Klaus Kinski, who in turn plays Landgrave Ludwig,” says Eldgasen, whose strange Pirmasens homage was back then failed in local politics.
Today it would probably be different. The main actress Sandra, a long-time artist friend of Boris Eldagsen, was none other than Sandra Hülser. She can now be seen in other Eldgasen videos.
Illustrator, photographer and philosopher: Boris Eldagsen
But even without celebrity support, his artistic work is convincing. Eldagsen started out 30 years ago as an excellent draftsman, then switched to staged human photography and studied philosophy at the same time.
“If you look at this exhibition, it’s actually 30 years of history, how I try to become aware of what I’m doing there and how I always approach the question differently: Who is man? And who am I?” says Boris Eldagsen.
With silent mail to the collective unconscious
With CG Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, Eldagsen underpinned joint projects with other artists long before the buzzword of collaboration emerged.
He runs a kind of silent post with a friend in Bangladesh: the two send each other pictures, revise them without consultation and view the results as joint works.
“We are now combining our backgrounds from a different cultural and religious context. The intersection is closer to the collective unconscious than if each of us did it alone,” he explains.
Eldagsen wants public debate
And Eldagsen has discovered a completely different creative tool: AI. As with drawing, he can draw entirely from his imagination and no longer needs an event in front of a camera.
Last autumn, Boris Eldagsen spectacularly rejected the Sony Award for Creative Photography in London – his submission was not a photo, but an AI image. Eldagsen wanted public debate. The non-winning picture, whose art market value has long since multiplied, can now be seen in Pirmasens.
Herunterladen audio (3.2 MB | MP3)
AI as a reflection of the digital present
Meanwhile, its author is already thinking of new procedures: no longer small series, as is usual in photography, but a single work consisting of photography, AI, drawing and painting.
And beyond the material, working with AI makes absolute sense for the philosophical artist Boris Eldagsen – as a reflection of the digital present.
“AI works with an incredible number of images as training material. And that is something like a collective unconscious and a mirror of what you can find as images of us on the Internet,” says Eldagsen.
“Boris Eldagsen – Back to the Future: Retrospective 1988-2023” can be seen in the Alte Post Forum in Pirmasens until April 7th, 2024.