Artists Anonymous: Negative Room

Artists Anonymous is a collective of three young artists who live and work in Berlin and London. The collective was founded in 2001 when the artists were studying at the University of Arts in Berlin, where they took courses taught by Georg Baselitz and Stan Douglas. Their latest, and perhaps most widely recognized project, "Unconditional love" was shown at the Venice Biennial in 2009. They had other institutional exhibitions at the Frieze Art Fair, London; "The fictitious blowing up of the Hamburger Bahnhof" at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; "Communication and Association" at the Liverpool Biennial in 2008; "Play the City" at Kunsthalle Frankfurt/Main; "Rapture" at the Museum for Russian Art, Kiev; and lastly, at ARCO 2009, selected by the curator Alistair Hicks.

Their work method challenges habitual notions of the artist as a solitary romantic author, in favour of teamwork, the idea of "atelier" in the manner of the great masters of painting, leaving aside individualities:

"Anonymity entails sacrificing our own names as artists, but at the same time this compels people to focus on our work, rather than us. We believe it would be good if you were to see a work of art without knowing who had made it, not only in terms of which individual person, but whether this person was male or female, young or old. We therefore believe that if our art is what really matters, then we should relinquish all the limelight."

Artists Anonymous are borderline and multidisciplinary artists who use installation, photography, painting, video and performance. New ideas such as "afterimages" and "negative rooms" unfold with violence, excess, circus and the baroque. There are paintings that look like negatives of photographs and photographs taken of original paintings. Every work of art contains another within it. Ultimately, the notion of identity collapses as a consequence of their strategies of dialectics, masquerade and chaos.

In this exhibition for the Festival Off of PhotoEspaña 2010, Artists Anonymous present a multidisciplinary project that explores the unstable relationship and shifting border between photography and painting, with special emphasis on the key role that the "negative room" plays in artistic composition.

Their work is a part of numerous private and institutional international collections, including the Saatchi Collection, Deutsche Bank Collection, Manchester City Art Gallery, UK Advaney Collection, Walsall Art Museum, Rubell Collection, and the Zabludowicz Collection.

Artists Anonymous 
"Negative Room"