Seth Pick

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

Much of my work begins with an interest in what happens between states and what happens when the in-between-ness is maintained. Rather than resolving oppositions, I try to construct images that remain suspended; past/present, humour/melancholy, sincerity/irony, flesh and thought. I am drawn to creating paintings that resist stable categories, allowing the works to occupy different emotional and pictorial registers rather than collapsing into singular interpretations. By positioning themselves between these states, the paintings invite sustained reflection rather than immediate resolution, heightening perception and consistently postponing definition. Figures and recognisable motifs recur throughout the work, but they rarely function as illustrations of a fixed narrative. Instead, I think of the paintings as operating within a figural space, where meaning emerges through the interaction of image, material and association rather than through storytelling. Material interruptions can unsettle the immediacy of recognition and weaken narrative identification, allowing the figure to assert a more immediate pictorial presence. References drawn from different visual traditions are brought together without being fully reconciled, allowing familiar visual languages to become newly unstable. Equally important is the material language of painting itself. I want to implicate the paintings in their own making, allowing representation to operate while making the conditions of its...

Artwork