CHRISTIAN HOLZE
50/50

The Barberini Faun (circa 220 BC) in Munich's Glyptothek is the ideal image of a muscular beau in a lascivious pose, reminiscent of those seen on social media or in perfume advertisements. Christian Holze (*1988) creates a multi-potentiated version that seems to reproduce itself from within. Paradoxically, the figure essentially disappears into itself. Transferred to our contemporary viewing experience, the omnipresence of well-known works on the internet and consumer products renders them virtually invisible, as they are hardly consciously perceived anymore. Only through the act of alienation do they become unique again, attracting attention. However, Holze undermines the claim to uniqueness by making it an edition piece: the multiplication of potentiation, which is, of course, limited by the artist.

 

Young and muscular are also the bodies of the two men who rendezvous in Time Sleep (#NNts2202) (2022)—Vincenzo de Rossi's Dying Adonis and the famous Dying Gaul. The astonishing fusion of two dying figures is disconcerting. Where one might believe to recognize sexual desire in the pairing, it is actually the ecstasy of death that is intended. In Adonis, the fatal wound inflicted by the boar is clearly visible on the right thigh. Death and life, sex and dying—the transitions are fluid and ultimately a matter of interpretation. Seamlessly interlocking here are also templates from different eras: the *Dying Gaul* is a Roman marble copy after a Hellenistic bronze; Vincenzo de Rossi's marble sculpture dates from the 16th century.

 

Exaggeration through overstatement and multiplication, ironic distortion through absurd new combinations, bold colors, and glossy surface finishes: Christian Holze is a skilled juggler of a hyperreality at the intersections of analog and digital, art and commerce, present and antiquity, where the question of original and copy, of model and imitation, no longer arises for many. In his artistic practice, he brings together painting, sculpture, prints, and computer-based as well as AI-supported processes. The 3D model for the Barberini Faun, for example, comes from a U.S. company. Where the original data originates—a scan of the original, from one of the countless copies—and how it was further processed remains unknown. The print is made by sintering a mixture of sand and epoxy resin. Conceivably affordable and readily available starting materials are turned into art in the 3D printer, whose data basis comes from a commercial source. Behind everything stands the artist as the authority who alone is entitled to select and legitimize art. This becomes particularly evident when Holze uses the letters CCH like a logo or watermark. While a watermark represents copy protection that is removed after purchase, the logos of well-known brands represent quality and exclusivity and are consciously displayed. In the art world, it was already the business-savvy artist-entrepreneur Albrecht Dürer who had his monogram (AD) protected as a brand.

 

In Christian Holze's work, the combination of the ideal of beauty in ancient sculpture with the aesthetics of social networks, marketing, and product design creates hybrid object and image worlds that raise pressing questions about existence and art: authenticity, commercialization, and desire. The works play sensually with the viewers—is there a boundary between observation and voyeurism, between description and desire? This has long been a fundamental motif in the reception of ancient art:

 

"An eternal spring, as in the blissful Elysium, clothes the enchanting masculinity of perfect years with pleasing youth and plays with gentle tenderness over the proud structure of his limbs." "[...] a mouth that forms the one who infused pleasures into the beloved Branchus."

 

This is how Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) describes the Apollo Belvedere. He approaches the Belvedere Torso with his pen as follows: "I was enchanted when I saw this body from behind, like a man who, after admiring the magnificent portal of a temple, is led to its summit, where the vault, which he cannot overlook, astonishes him anew."

 

From these lines, one might read the wet dreams of the homosexual "father of art history." At the same time, the works became icons of ancient sculpture through his texts, which one had to have seen—if not in the original, then at least as a copy. Countless reproductions were created in different sizes and materials—for the park of one's own castle or for the bourgeois salon: must-haves at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. In art academies, collections of plaster casts of ancient sculptures were used for teaching purposes because—as Winckelmann said—only through the "imitation of the ancients" could artists become "inimitable." Today, reproductions of ancient sculptures are still very popular: as polyresin figures for one's own garden, as images on calendars, T-shirts, or even cooking aprons. Also, the bold colors and partly glossy surfaces of Holze's works are not as new as one might think: In Winckelmann's time, the white sculpture corresponded to the aesthetic ideal. Today, we believe we know that antiquity was colorful, even of an almost pop-like vibrancy. As a projection surface and mirror of aesthetic as well as societal ideals, "antiquity" has been reinterpreted and appropriated in various ways for centuries. Holze's works effortlessly open up such wide associative spaces between art and commerce, admiration and appropriation, aesthetics and technology. It is up to each individual to decide how deeply they wish to delve into them.

 

Christian Holze (*1988 in Naumburg) studied media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig from 2011 to 2019, initially in the class of Christin Lahr and subsequently as a master student under Joachim Blank. Other stations of his studies were the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied sculpture with Julian Göthe and Anne Speier from 2015 to 2016, as well as the University of Fine Arts Hamburg, where he studied painting with Anselm Reyle from 2019 to 2020. In 2022, he received the Kaiserring Scholarship for Young Art.