Sylvester Engbrox

Secondary Road, Niederrhein (2009)

Sylvester Engbrox is a contemporary German painter. He was born in 1964 in Kleve, North Rhine-Westphalia. He lives and works in Paris.

Biography

In 1983, Engbrox obtained a baccalauréat specialising in graphic arts. He then decided to start earning as a traditional graphic artist, assistant photographer on set and a light technician. These experiences allowed him to work with Wolfgang Flur from the group Kraftwerk, on photo shoot locations. In 1984, he began to paint. In 1986, he left Düsseldorf to live in Paris, and turned to photography. From 1988 to 1991, he was a student at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie, in Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône). There he was a student of Arnaud Claass, Christian Milovanoff and Christian Gattinoni. He also had the opportunity to be Larry Fink’s photographic assistant.

From 1999 to 2005 he created and managed with two friends in Paris an independent music label, Home Laboratoire Moderne. He also contributed to the writing and the composition of titles with Sporto Kantes. In 2005, he set up a studio and dedicated himself to painting for good.

Work

The first three works featured in his catalogue are from 1994: Helen, Hotel Aya and Air Disaster 1. These canvases are oil paintings based on images found in small format and poorly printed general press. The artist’s work mainly introduces characters in elaborate and improbable settings. His first exhibition took place in 2008 at Galerie VivoEquidem in Paris. With Jean-Luc Chalumeau, who wrote the preface of the 2008 catalogue, we reached the conclusion that Sylvester Engbrox didn’t belong to any school, but that he emanated directly from the complexity of the contemporary world, bombarded by mainly digital images. The fact that Sylvester Engbrox grew up in Düsseldorf in the seventies and eighties and had very thorough training to be a photographer in Arles is significant. For him, the visible world of his youth, from the remainders of New Objectivity to flashes of Gerhard Richter through images, circulated on a large scale, to the Red Army Faction's acts, formed an obvious nourishing ‘foundation’. To that is add Andy Warhol, David Lynch’s cinema, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography and Kraftwerk’s music. Thus, Sylvester Engbrox, due to his culture of origin and his photography training, has always been interested in a certain projection of reality. He, who for years methodically compiled and filed tens of thousands of pictures from the general press, television magazines and the Internet, quite quickly realised that the world in its sensitive domain, if it definitely exists, is not as true as is said or that we are led to believe. Ultimately, he noted then accepted that the world is the total of the facts and not things (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 1.1). The digital era that Engbrox practically saw born and that he closely followed has confirmed this fact. Indeed, the ‘digital thing’ forgets nothing, throws away nothing, it accumulates relentlessly all realities one after the other.

Tina, Flight Data Recorder (2009)

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