Place Called Love

Painterly Staging Pop Culture Icons and Myths.

The psychedelic paintings of the artist duo Abetz & Drescher (Maike Abetz, born 1970 in Düsseldorf and Oliver Drescher, born 1969 in Essen) play with the longings of a generation that reinvented itself through the mass cultural transformation of music and media in the 1960s. Thus, Katharina Sieverding's former master students bring primarily American icons from the 1960s era of rock 'n' roll and youth protest culture to the canvas. In their collaborative works, Abetz & Drescher repeatedly penetrate the genres of self-portrait and icon painting, mixing epochs from the Renaissance to pop art: the artists often pose for the depictions of luminaries such as Maria Callas, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, or Elvis Presley, combining their pop cultural homage with an interest in mass culture as a mix of past, present, and future.

On the occasion of their first institutional solo exhibition Place Called Love at the Kunsthalle Rostock, the catalog of the same name provides an overview of twenty years of collaboration. Curator Tereza de Arruda wrote the accompanying text and conducted an interview with the artist duo.