“The high mission of all art is to give a foretaste of a higher universe reality through its illusions, to condense the feelings of time into thoughts of eternity.” The Urantia Book

In our work we try to understand the world differently, rather than a world in what is water and trees, in which men and women look like this or that and squeeze each other’s hands, which are made of flesh and blood. We strive for the elevation of the human being to a state of cognition, beyond the sensual to the spiritual. To evoke an experience that is highly spiritual and that goes beyond the pure matter of our art. A realisation that recognises the intelligent spirit (MIND) in everything, which we call transcendent.

We find that the objectively and individually perceived beauty is to be recognised as the highest form of aesthetics. It is completely free from the ‘ad momentum’ or today’s prevailing norms (of a society). Consequently, beauty sensed in the imagination must be true. John Keats put it aptly:

“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty – that is all Ye know on Earth,
and all ye need to know.”

John Dewey claimed in his theory of art that the origin of art lies in human experience. We agree with this. That’ s why we research with dedication to essentially deepen and enhance the experience with our work.

MAHATMA GANDHI DESCRIBED THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE OF GOD’S PRESENCE THUS: “THERE IS AN INDEFINABLE POWER THAT PERVADES EVERYTHING. I FEEL IT EVEN THOUGH I DO NOT SEE IT. THIS INVISIBLE POWER COMMUNICATES ITSELF AND NEEDS NO FURTHER PROOF. IT IS TRANSCENDENT, THAT IS, IT IS BEYOND WHAT MY SENSES CAN PERCEIVE. YET IT GIVES US THE POSSIBILITY TO EXPERIENCE THE EXISTENCE OF GOD IN A VERY MODEST WAY.”. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE TRY TO PORTRAY IN OUR WORKS.

According to Hegel, the ideal of art was realised in the sculptures of ancient Greece. He saw in it the fusion of divine content and human form. More than that, he saw the divine represented in the form of the human body. We go further in our work and want to make the Supreme Spirit, the indwelling spirit in creation, more tangible.

What do we as artists understand by divinity or spirituality,
which we call ‘DIVINE’ in our artistic context?

The experience of a mysterious power, which we regard as the manifestation of a spiritual, even extrasensory energy. Our art mutates into a vehicle through which a relationship to this force becomes possible. This includes the relativity, the universality, the absoluteness and the transcendence, as the highest reality of being. So our art should transmit this energy, virtually jump out at us and occupy us, with new ideas and possibilities that we have never thought of before. This energy is invisible and cannot be made visible. But our art makes it tangible, or at least imaginable. And that gives us the shiver that pervades us when we feel the energy of our works of art.

In the supposedly underdeveloped societies where dictators oppress the nation, the gods are mostly non-existent. They are banned and eradicated to pretend the omnipotence of the dictator. They are only allowed in cases when they can be instrumentalised for the abuse of authority. But the gods and spirituality are important for the people, like water is important for flowers. Without them, the people perish spiritually and die inwardly and emotionally. The belief in a higher, more mighty entity than man, is part of our human evolution. For thousands of years, humans drew their energy from rituals and the belief in the gods, other worlds, existences and dimensions. It is still like that today. And although the levels of knowledge are always changing, it will remain so in the future. Human beings are spiritual creatures.

In earlier times, everyday objects such as household utensils, carpets, bows, spears and everything else were made with so much more care and devotion that today we chase after them and give them places of honour in museums. Temples and buildings, which are supposed to have facilitated interaction with gods, have also been artistically decorated to such a great degree. In our art, which of course includes the “objet trouvé” works, we want to go one step further. We would like to make visible the significance of the transcendent intelligence existing in the whole of creation, which we call DIVINE.

According to John Dewey, the work of art has lost its natural status. It has become the representative of art, nothing more. Moreover, works of art are now produced like any other article for the market. Our art should have an effect. It should offer us an enlightenment and open up new, transcendent spaces.

Our art is definitely a context-reflexive art. Through the context of spirituality and through the “this is art, this is not art valuations” as well as through the works “deification of old masters”, it triggers the discourse on the status attributed to art. Similar to Duchamp, Levine, Fraser, Asher, Buren, Haacke, McCollumn, Lawler or Sturtevant – we behave “contrary to norms” and subversively circumvent the standards, norms, rules and categories established by art critics, art dealers, curators and philosophers.

OUR WORK IS CONCERNED WITH ONTOLOGY. IN THIS CONTEXT, QUESTIONS SUCH AS INDIVIDUALITY AND UNIVERSALITY, ABSTRACTNESS AND CONCRETENESS HAVE AN IMPORTANT ROLE TO PLAY.

In his most famous study of media theory, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan named the medium itself as the actual message. In our art, it is glitter. It stands for the materialisation of the divine. The content and the form takes a second place.

On the topic of credibility and authenticity in art, Harald Szeemann once said: “There is such a fundamental thing and it is called honesty. That’s where you feel whether someone is bluffing or really serious. That is only a small part of the perception. But it’s part of it, isn’t it? You can imagine the amount of bluff videos I’m bombarded with. I receive them from morning till night. Fifty of them turn out to be slapstick and among them is one with the keynote where you feel the artist means it truthfully.”

OUR GREATEST WISH FOR THE FUTURE IS TO INSTALL OUR ART, AS DANIEL BUREN IS ALREADY DOING, AT UNUSUAL PLACES, OUTSIDE THE ART ESTABLISHMENT. THIS INTERVENTION IN THE EXHIBITION STRUCTURE IS NECESSARY, JUST AS WITH MICHAEL ASHER, IN ORDER TO CONTRAST THE RELATIONSHIP OF ART TO SPACE WITH THAT OF THE HUMAN BEING TO SPIRITUALITY.

We visited countless museums, exhibitions and art fairs. We noticed that the art did not touch us, because it was dark, without light. We have to change that.

As society is preoccupied with superficialities such as wars, destruction of our planet, senseless consumption, fanatical religions and management of earthly goods, it is up to us artists to play the part of the spiritual.

We cannot regard our art as rational. We can’t. If we engage with it and don’t think about it, it catches us strongly emotionally and allows us to transcend unnoticed.

In the Middle Ages, spirituality in art was associated with suffering. Jesus on the cross, saints and martyrs, hell and death. There was no sense of joy. But spirituality has nothing to do with suffering, but with knowledge. It can be presented in a different way.

That children in America are perpetrating mass murder is a reflection of the disastrous state of our consciousness as a species. We are struggling to expand into the universe, but what do we have to offer other worlds and civilisations? How to break ecosystems, destroy a planet and wipe out other co-existing beings? Build weapons to kill each other? How to breed other living beings in agony, kill them senselessly and eat them with gusto? Or how to oppress minorities with greed, money and power? No. We should first upgrade our consciousness and become creative instead of destructive, loving instead of hating, even a bit more divine. Then we could create something truly great.

DEMONS ARE ADMIRABLE IN MANY WAYS. THEY ARE, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, OF DIVINE ORIGIN. WE SOMETIMES LET THEM SPEAK THROUGH OUR ARTWORK, BUT YOU DON’T NECESSARILY HAVE TO WORSHIP THEM.

Since the explanatory concepts of churches and schools of thought are no longer sufficient today, art is needed. It is the catalyst for spiritual insights in our time.

If we could rule the world for one day, we would destroy all weapons on earth and prohibit their production forever. Then the goddess Kali wouldn’t have much to do. Ironically, she is not only the goddess of death and destruction, but also the goddess of salvation, she can fulfill wishes.

When we create an artwork, it is done in a certain atmosphere and environment. It has the meaning of a high prayer for us, a kind of consecration. In which, at the end of the work process, a transformation of being takes place and the work is transferred into the spiritual-sacral realm.

Conscious being should take place where you are, in the here and now. Not where you were or where you might want to be. The unconscious being works secretly, it cannot be grasped by the senses. But it can be perceived. When we create our art, we experience an energy that pulls us out of systems and concepts with a jolt and makes us feel the momentum of the transcendent, the divine.

Our artistic approach should expand the art, as it did before with Fluxus and Dada. It will abolish the material form as the final result of the artistic process. It will also not value the process itself, nor, as in the abstract, the search for a new form in expression. The transcendent is to be made perceptible, that which is actually not materially representable. Herbert Kühn wrote 1919 in the newspaper “Der Sturm” in the context of expressionism: “In expressionism, the represented and the object fall far apart. The represented begins behind the painting.”

We want to make tangible that energy, the spark of the gods, which is present in everything and everyone. Just as it was described in the Thomas Apocrypha. Everything else, like the form and the matter of the artwork are only a companion thing, a bridge we build to make our artistic vision understandable. It is another dimension of art. A quality that cannot actually be described in words.

Our intention is to use the form of our artworks as a kind of anchor, in order to detach ourselves from it completely mentally in the further course of the viewing process. It is meant to elevate us spiritually, to make us feel the transcendent, the overarching, the DIVINE SPIRIT, as the force at work within.

If you look at a house or a machine, you would never think that there is no intelligence, no conscious spirit behind it. The same applies to the universe and everything that surrounds us. In our works we try to bring this into focus. We extract and compensate this spirit and make it essential to experience in the works.

In our works, we do not know in advance of the working process what we are going to depict. The works are created in a trance. The energies, worlds, beings and dimensions extracted in this way materialise and thus become accessible to our dimension.

The artist is a kind of demiurge. Someone who, like God, creates new worlds. In principle, these are imaginary, on closer inspection not real: an illusion. But because they have arisen in our consciousness, materialised as art, they exist on this level, here on our earth, and are therefore now very real.

We experience the transcendent effect of our art by reflecting on ourselves. We find ourselves recognising things that we did not know before.

“Salvator Mundi” by Leonardo da Vinci, the most expensive painting in the world, was auctioned off in 2017 for around 400 million euros. But basically it’s a piece of old wormwood, with brittle pigments on it. Touched up and restored so many times that there is only a part of the original substance and colours left. But the rest is the spirit, which cannot be proven by scientific means, but which is so important and the most valuable thing about the work.

The themes in our art are inexhaustible, like creation itself. Since we have set ourselves the goal of making the inherent creative spirit in all things tangible and more comprehensible, we draw on themes from the pensum of the great overall in our artworks.

These can be, like in our objects and collages, familiar themes or objects from our surroundings. But it can also be, as in our paintings, the insight into unknown worlds, beings and dimensions through a targeted meditative extraction. That is why we never run out of ideas for our works. This sounds banal at first, but it is not. Because creation and everything that surrounds us is not trivial, but rather a highly complicated interplay of things that are all interrelated. Everything has a close effect in interaction with other things. One example of this chaos theory is the well-known butterfly effect.