David Moses

Silly Symphonies Series

Faszination an der Verrätselung der Welt

David Moses’s (b. Bonn, 1983; lives and works in Berlin) series Silly Symphonies is an extended study of the string of animated short films of the same title produced by the Walt Disney Studios between 1929 and 1939. For the project begun in 2017, Moses chose fourteen of the altogether seventy-five films, probing each in a dedicated body of paintings. Dismantling selected frames into their components, the artist’s large-format canvases feature fragmented figures in pastels on luminous color fields.

Areas of abstract composition in solid hues and swirling hachures overlap with comic-strip eyes, paws, and wide-open mouths; a tinted haze wafts over the mêlée. The titles—Moses encodes his works with alphanumeric keys and timestamps for the selected frames—already suggest the artist’s skepticism concerning the affirmative power of animation. What remains are snippets of characters as aesthetic anchors, disjected members loosely embedded in otherwise abstract painting. Through color, line, overpainting, and effacement, Moses relieves his heroes and heroines of their pedagogical tenor and cultural-historical baggage. Rather than the plots of his filmic sources, it is the theatricality of the characters that inspires the artist in his engaging expeditions into the media archive.

The catalogue is released on occasion of the exhibition Dirt Track at Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin. With an essay by Larissa Kikol and a conversation between David Moses and Linda Peitz.