My name is Arno Beck and I’m from Bonn (Germany), which is also where I currently live and work. I’m a painter and printmaker and I did my MA in Fine Arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. My prints and conceptual paintings evolve around digital aesthetics and focus on analogue production of digital images. It is an interplay between the contemporary digital screen world and traditional techniques. By using those manual, analogue techniques my aim is to make the digital images physically experienceable. Art and music have always played a key role in my life since an early age. Therefore, I love the idea of building your life around the one thing that you obsess over the most. For a long time, I have been both DJing and painting but at one point made the decision to put my main focus on one thing only.

I stem from a generation that grew up being confronted with the visual phenomena of the computer age, and as a painter engaging with digital culture, I’m transferring those experiences into painting. With my paintings, I aim to portray the essence of the digital. Low-resolution or high-pixelation are key characteristics of digital representation because those are features you won’t find beyond computer-generated imagery.
Initially, digital art is intangible, and as a painter, I am expressing the urge of capturing digital aesthetics with painterly means. So, when you deal with digital images and transfer them into the physical space, you have to start thinking about surface structure and how the materialisation can be achieved. The transformation of those screen-based impressions and the materialisation into physical, haptic existence is one of the key aspects of my work. With my approach, I humanise technology, welcoming the glitches of the handmade – and the error is part of the beauty.

That series of woodblock prints is based on the thirty-two colours that the GameBoy Color console was able to display. I mix my oil colours in relation to this thirty-two-colour palette and apply them to twelve thousand small hand-cut wood bricks, each representing a single pixel in the motif. Line by line, I combine these wood bricks to a big mosaic, which I then print on thin Japanese paper. I don’t utilise printmaking for the purpose of reproduction, therefore all works are unique in the sense of a classic painting. I would describe my works as conceptual paintings, using a painterly language, which is not necessarily manifesting in painting itself.

Actually, the woodblock prints came first, but the typewriter works are following the same thought process. Initially, the typewriter wasn’t bought with the idea to create art. A playful approach turned into a much bigger thing. I’m continuously searching for different analogue ways of translating digital imagery from the screen to the pictorial space. The typewriter drawings are achieved by typing line by line using an old-fashioned manual typewriter. I utilise different letters and symbols, which create a variety of differing grey values.
I develop a lot of new ideas from previous projects. Coming up with new works often derive from working in different media – each medium demands different thinking and a specific approach, which again gives birth to new ideas. At the same time, keeping your eyes open and staying curious are good ways for constant artistic progression.

I am not a gamer, it all really goes back to a leftover childhood fascination growing up with the Nintendo. It’s less about the games themselves but rather about the aesthetic of early digital representation. The beauty and the clumsiness of highly pixelated images, graphics and interfaces just fascinate me.

That wouldn’t excite me, as I’m primarily interested in finding analogue ways of transforming digital imagery and making it physically experienceable.

I used to play a game called Boogerman on Nintendo. It’s a pick and flick adventure where the mighty Boogerman is able to flyfart, whilst picking boogers and throwing them at villains. Can it get any better than that?

There are several shows coming up this year. Keep checking my website for all the updates.