Damien Deroubaix:
Berlin-based French artist Damien Deroubaix works across a diverse range of media from painting and watercolour on paper to sculpture and installation. He has developed, over the years, a complex and unique imagery that reveals the influence of major figures in the history of painting such as Jerome Bosch, Brueghel, Holbein, Max Beckman, Francis Bacon and David Hockney, with whom he shares a fascination for myths and symbolism in the field of representation. Deroubaix's prolific work seamlessly combines medieval imagery alongside pictures and slogans taken from advertising and political propaganda, thereby echoing the use of images in contemporary counter-cultures such as Grindcore music.
In his new commission for COMMA, Deroubaix has experimented with wood block, a technique normally reserved for printmaking. Sculpting by gouging out the surface layer of the wood, his images are made visible through the application of a layer of black ink. For this new work Deroubaix has drawn his inspiration from the biblical story of the Temptation of St Anthony, relating this ancient tale to the pursuit of money and power in our contemporary world. Accompanying this major new undertaking is a large sculpture elevated in the centre of the front gallery. The sculpture is a tree on which sinister heads and bats have seemingly either grown, or been hung or fallen onto the ground.
Damien Deroubaix (b. Lille, France, 1972) lives and works in Berlin.
