CASE (Andreas von Chrzanowski) — „untitled" | September 2013

A fist and a peace sign in one hand—contrast as an image

Location
Reisholzer Hafen | Düsseldorf
CASE (Andreas von Chrzanowski) — „untitled"

Date created

September 2013

Description

Andreas von Chrzanowski, better known as CASE, was born in Schmalkalden in 1979 and now lives in Frankfurt am Main. His artistic roots lie in the East German graffiti scene, where he has been working with spray paint since 1995. In 2000, together with three other graffiti artists, he founded the group MA'CLAIM—one of the pioneering groups in photorealistic graffiti, which is still regarded internationally as a style-defining force. His training as a painter and his studies in restoration have honed his technical precision and are visibly reflected in his visual language.

CASE’s trademark is his photorealistic, often monumental depiction of hands and body parts—a motif that has earned him worldwide recognition. In art history, hands are considered one of the most expressive and, at the same time, technically demanding motifs of all, and CASE succeeds in capturing their emotionality and dynamism with extraordinary precision. Yet he is never concerned with mere anatomical reproduction: he removes body parts from their familiar context, alienates and exaggerates them, confronts classical notions of beauty with controversial, almost grotesque visual moments—and thus creates a presence that is entirely his own, both unsettling and fascinating.

Central to his work is the idea of overlapping hands as an image of movement, connection, and—as at the Reisholz Harbor—internal contradiction. For CASE, this movement never refers solely to the physical gesture, but always also to the political and social: gestures speak a language that needs no translation; often, a hand gesture says more than a thousand words. In Düsseldorf, he consistently applies this superimposition technique to a single, internally divided statement: He paints each of the two hands twice—once clenched into a fist, once open in a peace sign formed by the index and middle fingers—and superimposes both poses semi-transparently on top of one another, so that the fist and the peace sign remain visible at the same time, interwoven, with neither gesture ever completely disappearing or prevailing. Aggression and peace, resistance and reconciliation thus do not exist one after the other, but in the same moment, in the same hand—an illustration of how close these stances are to one another and how much every gesture, every political position, always carries its opposite within itself. Only at the fingertips does the strict photorealistic anatomy break down: in garish green and red, like a second, digital layer superimposed over the classical painting, the tension of this moment is made even more visible.

The mural was created in 2013 in Düsseldorf as part of the first 40Grad Urban Art Festival.

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