Miltos Manetas
Miltos Manetas (born 1964) began to capture the technical intersection points of the information society and its users in images and the most diverse media forms: PowerBooks, PlayStations, computer cables, joysticks, websites, and computer games. He is one of the few contemporary artists to explicitly deal with the media of the Internet with the self-conception of a painter. Aside from founding his own art movement NEEN he is primarily known for his timely, playful adaptations of Jackson Pollock’s Action Paintings and the homages to Andy Warhol, Lucio Fonatana, and Joseph Kosuth. Especially Jackson Pollock, the primary representative of Abstract Expressionism, is considered the embodiment of a type of artist who transferred the painting process with his dripping technique to the surface of his pictures by means of his intuitive approach. Miltos Manetas’ also acquiesces to this need to create intuitive pictures by allowing everyone to paint “like Jackson Pollock” by means of a software he developed and signs the completed pictures with his name after the end of the painting process. But it is the painting process itself that has changed. The great gestured and physical moment as well as the duct of the painting process is now missing. The viewer is in action to be sure, but the intuitive process is executed by means of a machine that thus demonstrates this media’s possibilities and boundaries regarding creative freedom. Only references to his works in the form for postcards and posters – material links – will be shown in the exhibition. The works themselves can be found on the web under www.jacksonpollock.org
