Antje Dorn

In the mid-1990s, Antje Dorn published the book “Cookie Park”, a reference work that is not a lexicon, but rather a fund of codes and images.

The Berlin artist draws from this fund in her work – in drawings and paintings, their meaning is far more than the sum or repetition of their parts.

In the ink drawings “rare animals and numbers” (2006), for example, she places animal motifs and numbers on the same stage of artistic evolution: stylized pigs, sheep, or hybrid creatures make use of the world of numbers; conversely, digits become independent beings with more or less countable character traits. For her series “Pupille” (2007-2009), on the other hand, she takes photos of handcrafted cameras, the shape of which brings McLuhan’s formula, according to which the medium is the message, up for discussion with relish.

In the series “Imbisse” (from 2004) Antje Dorn paints comic-like houses and shops in varnish and oil on partly large-format printing plates. The typology of the buildings is reminiscent of the famous study “Learning from Las Vegas” from 1972, in which the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Stephen Izenour examined how architecture creates meaning. At the end of the study, there were two categories that Antje Dorn seems to take up in her group of works in an extremely sensible and playful way: While the “decorated shed”, a mere speechless box, screams out its message using oversized lettering, the type of “duck” is symptomatic of a building that symbolizes what it is. In Dorn’s “CARGO” series (gouache on wood, 2010) such ducks and other animals appear as protagonists of a 42-part logistics chain.

Antje Dorn’s world of images feels just as much at home in the reference system of a media appropriation of images (from advertising, cityscape, or comic world) as in the realms of semiotics (with all its syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimensions). Much more crucial, however, is that she finds and invents her visual language for this, which is neither idiosyncratic nor simply merely subjectivistic.

“The world of visual abbreviations and symbols is bundled, re-sorted, and interpreted by Antje Dorn,” writes Michael Glasmeier, “and we are amazed to see how moving and different simple things can be when we begin to read with them.”