Redirections
After the first lockdown in Amsterdam in 2020, I went into a thrift store by chance. In a dusty corner (the art department) I found a painted portrait that was kind of weird, in an interesting way. I thought I could maybe paint it over, change it a bit, to make it even weirder. The price tag was 7,50 euro and I bought it. As I got excited by the final result (even weirder indeed) I decided to go back to the thrift store for more secondhand art pieces to work on.
After doing some research I realized that there are loads of artists and filmmakers going to flea markets and thrift stores to collect secondhand art and found footage for the pleasure of repurposing it into something else. As a matter of fact, artists have been doing this for a long time, but this genre of art just didn’t get so much exposure. The work and genre of repurposed art didn’t find a common name yet; it has been called Modification Paintings (by Asger Jorn) and ‘Re-Directed Art’ (by David Irvine), other people call it ‘up-cycled art’ or ‘second hand upgraded art’.
For myself, I’ve decided to call it Redirections/THRIFT.