Helmut Middendorf incorporates found images from comic strips, tabloids and art history in his layered, frenetic paintings. In an interview included in this catalogue of works from the last ten years he lists some of his artistic inspirations: Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Guston and Warhol, and also the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, a line of whose he has employed as a title of several paintings: We slide on the surface of things.