installation view gallery Sfeir-Semler |
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| By doing so, Finlay commemorates continually suppressed tabus, like - for example - the "Family"of German fighter planes. Undoubtedly, these aircrafts were famous testimonials to the ingenuity of gifted engineers. At the same time, though, they were the deathly tools of Adolf Hitler's aggressive politics of conquest and expansion.
Or likewise, in "Menagerie", he reminds us of how the Austrian car producer Porsche not only built the peaceful "Volkswagen", the people's car, but seamlessly went on to also contribute to the Nazi's war efforts by designing the "Volksdrachen" and the "Volkselefanten", or "People's Dragon" and "People's Elefant" respectively - armored tanks designed by Porsche's armaments manufacturing branch. |
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 "bench" |
" Two Silvers / Two Telegrams " | |
"drum" |
The white sandstone drum is a Memorial for Liberty , Egality and Fraternity, more exactly for Vialla and Barra , two children , martyrs , who where shot when leading the People to the Bastille by playing on a drum on the 14 th of July 1789.By naming them "Flageolets ", Finlay makes an Allegorie to the fluting Mythological Pan and the peacful meadows and flocks of sheep of Arcadia. | |
"Japanese Starks" |
Finlay applies similar techniques in his work "Japanese Starks", creating wooden sculptures of Japanese ships-starks from World War II. As so often with arms and weapons, the innocent aesthetics of the wooden models mask its deadly function. | |
"Three Scythes" |
The "Three Scythes" remind us of the slow metamorphosis of violence. In Christian mythology, the scythe - originally a peaceful harvesting tool - already has a deadly double-meaning in the hands of the "Grim Reaper". In Finlay's work, it is transformed into an SS-rune, symbolizing fascist arbitrariness and violence. | |
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In another work, three commemorative tablets of black slate, Finlay leads the audience into a different, yet well-known historic period: the French Revolution. Its symbol of violence was the guillotine, chiseled into the stone with cold perfection. The abstract black slant squares, quote the revolutionary suprematist Russian Artist Malewitsch , as well as the Jacobinian revolutionaries, as self-proclaimed judges over life and death. "Osez" (dare) was their battle-cry , "Laconic" were their deadly actions, and the guillotine the "Medium of Their Message". | |
installation view gallery Sfeir-Semler |
In the upper rooms of the gallery,we displayed an 100 postcard-size prints, these are the artist's "sketch-book". Almost all of his most important pieces are conceptualized like this and have been printed in Finlay's Hawthorne Press. They document the whole poetry, but also the shattering power and controversial explosiveness of his work. | |
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