‘Skull Fuck’: Matthias Groebel’s mysterious painting machine

Whether it be with the innocent ‘drawings’ of Richard Tuttle, the enigmatic watercolour on gesso works of Joseph Yaeger, or, in this case, the technologically-derived paintings of Matthias Groebel, Stuart Shave and his gallery balance intellectual weight and clarity.

These are sentiments echoed by Groebel and Shave’s admirers attending the opening of the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery: ‘Skull Fuck’. Shoes: black leather, or else those technical in material composition. Coats: black, long. Hair: cropped and natural (my brown shoes and ripped jeans were conspicuously irregular to say the least). But, self-consciousness aside, I set about scrutinising Groebel’s work.

You might know the German artist for his fusion of television imagery and his own photographs to produce what Modern Art terms “machine assisted paintings and films”. To make these paintings Groebel employs a custom-made machine which translates the statically noisy images from a screen to the canvas. The machine applies one colour at a time in accordance with his commands, but maps out the image and so advises where on the canvas this colour belongs.

Remarkably analytical and technically able, Groebel strikes me as having the hallmarks of the great thinkers that history tells us about. He is curious, attentive, ambitious and creative. But there is also something humble and punk in his approach: it’s both DIY and democratic. The technology of his first machine was taken from a children’s construction kit. Interviewed by Plaster last year, he said: “I had a rule not to use images that people would recognise. No politicians. No well-known actors. No soap opera celebrities.” In so doing, Groebel leaves behind an enrapturing mystery.

The show exhibits both new and old paintings (new: late 2024, old: 1991). Groebel did not attempt to explain his work to me (though he is no doubt too wise to even consider such a thing), and instead highlighted the show’s title: ‘Skull Fuck’, which was originally intended as the title of Grateful Dead’s first live album. Their record label wouldn’t have it, so he told me, but Stuart Shave, presently propping up a gallery wall, would.

But how deep do these paintings go? Do they extend beyond themselves as material objects? They do have an occasional pang of the lacklustre about them, the pasty palette and flat surface perhaps weakening their impact, but to engage with Groebel’s work is to engage with cultural effects of technologies both past and present: painting meets camera, meets CRT, meets ‘painting machine’ (software + hardware), meets gallery walls, meets iPhone. In this age of swiping and cropping, Groebel’s paintings add to the age-old relationship between technology and painting: Vermeer and his lenses, Degas and his photographs, Warhol and his use of it all. And here, Groebel and his painting machine. The rest doesn’t need explaining.