Tom Ellis

The Vacuum

March 28 - May 9 2010

Mistakes, failure and negation play a key role in Tom Ellis' work. On the one hand he is interested in mechanisms that result in errors; on the other he likes to investigate his own work for possible errors - and to implement them into its concept. Ellis' artistic approach could be described as a constant search for an artistic point zero. It is about the question of if and how art can be possible without given references to form, content or history; this again is the result of a fundamental scepticism towards all thematic preferences and of a ruthless analysis of what art is really about. One result of the analysis is that you always have the work of art as an event in time and space, another that you always have the artist who produces it and declares it as such. Ellis accepts these as two fundamental conditions; they serve him as a minimal starting point from where he can start producing art. One result is the focus on painting and sculpture, as these two media are the most traditional and hence self-evident; another result is the analysis of himself as an artist-subject, predominantly determined by his own biography and personal wishes and preferences. On the occasion of the presentation at Kunsthalle, Ellis produced the publication We Believe in Shit. The artistic programme it contains, a chair and paintings, stands for the basic programme of a museum and continues in the exhibition.

Oliver Kielmayer