The history of this exhibition leads back to the Westphalian province.

A self-taught artist in Münsterland had grown tired of his own abstract painting in the 1980s. He found it increasingly irrelevant at a time when television was experiencing the blessings of private and international broadcasters.

Phenomena such as test images and the end of broadcasting were soon to be a thing of the past, thanks to satellite television, private households were able to enjoy remote programs from distant countries.

The images broadcast in it interested the trained pharmacist more than the non-representational language of form.

What Googling on the Internet would later mean was zapping on TV back then.

For the media change almost forty years ago, Matthias Groebel not only developed a special sensorium - with the help of a friend who was a technology freak in the country, he invented a painting machine, which he had produced around two hundred pictures by 2001.

This is how an astonishing convolute of television grew up.

The show "A Change in Weather" in the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf, named after one of the works, is a late tribute to the Aachen native, who was born in 1958, as is more often the case with female artists of advanced age.

After he had settled in Cologne, he made a few contacts here and there during the heyday of the Rhenish art trade and even exhibited in a New York gallery, but apparently nobody really wanted to recognize the pressing contemporaneity of his ideas.

It was the artist Andreas Selg who became aware of Groebel a few years ago in the group show "Telegen" in Bonn and Liechtenstein and helped him to have an exhibition in the Bernhard Gallery in New York.

Since then, collectors have also approached Groebel, and his work also has value in this respect.

Distillates of media visibility

His apparatus, consisting of an airbrush gun and windshield wiper motor, preceded the first commercially available color plotters by some time. It enabled him to bring stationary television images onto the screen line by line - as a photo-realistic painting that effectively captures the aura of the cathode ray tube.

From today's perspective, Groebel's screen aesthetics seem like media archaeology.

It would be unthinkable without Warhol and spontaneously brings to mind his films, such as the long shots of people from his entourage or the Empire State Building.

At the same time, it predates the practice of younger generation artists such as Wade Guyton, who paint with the printer, in his case abstractly.

No less interesting is the arrangement in which Groebel chose his pictures: he switched on a program, recorded it on video, turned off the sound and immersed himself completely in the passing pictures for up to an hour.

Then he went into himself and called up those impressions that had particularly impressed him - mostly faces, which appear in the square images as random portraits and in their facial expressions reflect the emotional range that one can imagine in all the programs from reality TV to documentaries and fiction: the unknown people look melodramatic, aggressive or introverted, egomaniacal, disturbed, involved in some action.

The machine painter categorically set himself a target: Images with hints of violence should only come from feature films.

The Düsseldorf exhibition with its staggered walls is limited to heads, which are hung suggestively in a portrait gallery.

In addition to those "Painted Faces" there are also a smaller number of blurred, blurred landscapes or motifs that slide into the abstract, as if squeegees had been drawn over the wet paint in the style of Gerhard Richter.

With such images, Groebel had hacked into encrypted television programs, which was only possible with interference.

Over the years, small image sequences have also emerged in which fragmented impressions are reassembled associatively and whose meaning remains open.

Would have liked to see something of that too.

The fact that Groebel worked under a pseudonym for a long time after his work with "Broadcast Material 1989-2001" naturally did not increase his fame: after his death and under his name, he continued the work of the paraphotographer Ted Serios on the Internet, with which he after By his own admission, "had completely disappeared as an artist" — and got by as a employed pharmacist.

He is now working on a new machine to produce images.

Matthias Groebel: A Change in Weather (Broadcast Material 1989-2001)

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Kunstverein Düsseldorf, until February 26.

The catalog costs 48 euros.