With a degree in painting and inspired by so-called institutional criticism, Felix Gmelin is interested in the possibilities of painting as a form of resistance and its direct relation to a form of socio-political reality. He is frequently known to rework the experiences of his youth into his art. In a critical, yet personal investigation, he subtly unravels the complicated interweaving of self-development, socialization and emancipation with which he grew up in the late 1960s and 1970s. Gmelin’s first substantial work in which reproduction served as a productive impetus was Art Vandals (1996-1998), a series of 12 paintings and one object, modeled after examples of modern and contemporary artworks, all of which had been vandalized. His interest in degenerate art also falls within the interest of vandalism. The emptying of meaning is a consistent theme in his work, as a number of Gmelin’s paintings.
Felix Gmelin was born in Heidelberg in 1962 and has lived in Stockholm, Sweden, since he was nine.