Ian Anüll

The artist deliberately and explicitly dispenses with a signature style, thereby undermining the potential rise of a personal cult and ruling out the notion of artistic genius.

He draws and paints, he takes pictures, makes films and designs objects. Consumerism and the mass media provide the materials for his found pieces. He cleverly reinvents familiar signs and symbols, which are subtly alienated and transformed, surprising viewers with new levels of meaning. Anüll has long taken an interest in the systems and power structures that underlie marketing and mass consumption, undermining these with a variety of artistic devices. Through shifts in context, he also exposes the mechanisms of the art trade. He applies labels to his works of art and has even ironically appropriated the ubiquitous trademark symbol ® by declaring it to be his own registered trademark. Tellingly the R written backwards stands for “I” in Cyrillic script. —Axel Jablonski