2014

material: Gutenberg sealingwax, cardboard, greasy wool
dimensions: 85 x 60 x 200 cm

The prominent thinker Georges Didi-Huberman’s ideas on the ‘power of the imprint’ are well worth reading; he compared the imprint of a wax seal, the plaster cast of a death mask, of a struck or cast coin, or even the imprint of Christ’s face in the so-called Veil of Veronica – one of the most important relics of the Catholic Church – and concluded that all these imprints are a remote exertion of power: their authority lies in their removal from the imprint’s maker, but also in its symbolic presence in the imprint. Berger plays with such ideas, for example in the skeleton relics made entirely of red sealing wax, whereby there is a concurrence, as it were, of the imprint, the seal, and that which is sealed (the relic). —Frits Scholten

Guten Berger / Self-portrait 37 is part of the Skeleton project.