Elias Wessel

Elias Wessel was born in Bonn, Germany and is based in New York City since 2008. In an age of fast-changing technologies, offering numerous ways of generating images, he challenges the conventional definition of painting: Wessel creates his “paintings” without resorting to traditional painting techniques and eschews classical genres. The artist’s abstract works—which in many ways show connections to painterly practices—are in fact made up of photographs and digital material. Over the past several years, his practice has been increasingly focused on investigating the effects of digitization and the digital tools themselves. Above all, the quality of Elias Wessel’s working method lies in the way he links fundamental discourses in the history of photography with latest technologies and current sociopolitical issues.