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Rainer Dissel

Rainer Dissel. Everyman and Selfportrait – Beyond Facts

Subtile Stillleben – impulsive Mitteilungen

The work of Rainer Dissel (b. Gelsenkirchen, 1953; lives and works near Frankfurt am Main) spotlights the semantics of everyday phenomena and emphasizes their mutability in the creative process. His collages and tempera paintings on canvas—some oversized, others in small formats—incorporate personal memorabilia such as photographs, newspaper clippings, and pieces of gauze or fabric. In their content as well as their form, they address the principle of the palimpsest, in which existing material is overwritten. The artist’s aesthetic and analytical engagement with his materials goes hand in hand with an ongoing preoccupation with the questions of life today: politics, power, freedom, and the place of art in its peculiar history.

The book presents selected works by Dissel from the past twenty years. In addition to his paintings and collages, it features previously unpublished artist’s books. Essays by the German writer Hans Thill and the art historian Danièle Perrier round out the volume.