Symmetries: Valentin Hirsch

Starting in the early 2000s, Valentin Hirsch (b. Eschwege, 1978; lives and works in Berlin) worked dot for dot to construct his monstrously graceful ink drawings and etchings, a technique he compared to a tattoo artist’s. In 2010, he took the leap and switched from tracing paper to human skin. Drawing into skin is an irreversible act. Hirsch’s tattoos–he works exclusively in black ink–eschew all pretense, but their existence is also bound to a body and a life. The motifs in Hirsch’s tattoos reflect this ambivalence of the medium: beasts and shockingly comely skulls seem locked in confrontation or sprawl into one another; lines and abstract forms posit sharply edged boundaries that are otherwise alien both to life and to skin as an artistic material. Valentin Hirsch’s first monographic book highlights the transition from drawing to tattooing as an inevitable next step in his evolution as an artist. Essay by Gunter Damisch, interview with the artist by Uta Grosenick.