About the Work
Dieter Krieg's painted blow-up of a gramophone record of Erik Satie's '3 Melodies' is a gigantic three metres wide. The thick layer of oil paint hastily applied to the canvas with a broad brush in a heavy impasto dynamises the black vinyl and sets it in motion. Salvador Dalí seems then to have broken his lobster telephone onto it, since remains of the creature along with a pork chop are spinning round on the record. The trivial nature of the pictorial objects and their lack of congruence provoke and disturb the viewer. In addition to records, Krieg also painted huge heads of lettuce, chips and mattresses. "What I'm aiming for is inescapable presence," he explained. To this end he would alienate familiar objects and transform them to the point of grotesqueness and abstraction through abnormal enlargement. Satie remains silent, and the words on the record label are distorted, in part illegible. Krieg is pointing not towards the objects, but rather to their inaccessibility, locating the meaning of the painting in the artificial, that is to say, in the painterly itself.
