Kassel

Where the mixed media Kassel carries a single physical act of painting applied directly to the photographic surface, the lithograph version deploys three distinct forms: a large, roughly oval black mass with a slight internal sheen at the left, a smaller, more compact shape at centre, and a third partial form at the far right edge. These shapes were drawn or transferred into the lithographic matrix and are incorporated into the print rather than applied to it – they exist as part of the image rather than as interventions upon it.

The effect is correspondingly different. The mixed media mark reads as something that happened to the photograph: an event in real time, physical and irreversible. The lithographic forms read differently – as elements already present within the composition, as if the sky above Kassel had always contained these heavy, dark shapes, or as if they had been introduced as a kind of notation. Their organic, irregular silhouettes resist precise identification: they are not gestural brushmarks in any conventional sense, and not recognisable objects. They float above a city that remains fully itself beneath them.

Together, the two Kassel works of 1992 constitute a related investigation across different media: the same photograph, the same principle of overmarking, but different technical processes and different visual outcomes.