Eishockey

Peter Friedl

Eishockey, 2000

Artwork text

Friedl sometimes showed his own children's drawings together with drawings he had made as an adult, thus confronting his view as a child with that of the adult artist. This is not a glorification of the “childlike gaze” as a source of unbiased and value-free creativity that is unattainable for adults. Friedl relativizes the criteria for judging art. The drawing Ice Hockey is not his original children's drawing, about which the artist says: “They are so valuable that they are not for sale”. It is a copy that has been mounted directly on the wall as an oversized poster picture. The drawing shows ice hockey players drawn in white pencil on a green background. The boards of the field hockey field show advertising slogans of well-known brands. Players from the former Soviet Union meet a team from Sweden and draw our attention to the tense relationship between popular sport, politics and aesthetic narrative. (Doris Leutgeb)