Die Stimmungsbombe, 2000. Courtesy Sammlung Falckenberg
At the end of this year, the Sammlung Falckenberg will bring together seemingly poetic-surrealist images by US painter Ena Swanser and subversive-enigmatic works by Finnish artist Robert Lucander who now lives in Berlin. The exhibition’s title of Psycho is a reference to the eponymous horror classic by Alfred Hitchcock and calls to mind the disturbed nature of schizophrenics, psychopaths and other psychologically disturbed persons. Psycho is Greek for soul and the term referring to insanity is derived from the notion that a human’s spirit or soul can become ill; psychoanalysis, for example, is used to treat deep-rooted psychological traumata and behavioral disorders. Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho exposed, for example, the ugly face of unquestioning materialism but left the reader in doubt as to whether the gruesome scenes depicted in the novel emanate from the protagonist’s psychotic fantasies or whether he actually carries out these excessively violent acts. Colloquially, psycho is used to describe a mentally disturbed person who displays behavioral problems and a tendency towards aggressive conduct, thus having an unsettling and threatening effect on their environment. The use of this term leads one to expect a confrontation with art that takes non-conformism, insanity and thus the threatening and the sinister as its theme. This exhibition is on view at the Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg, from December 18 through
