1978–1982 Traumatic Constructions

The series “Traumatic Constructions” as a whole depicts a world in which humans, animals, and machines are fused in unsettling symbioses. These are hybrid bodies, apparatuses, and figures that appear both familiar and disturbing: human forms with animal heads, mechanical limbs, or surgical instruments, embedded in scenes that oscillate between dream, laboratory, and stage.

The drawings unfold a panorama of insecurity and disintegration—they reveal the violence of modern technology, the brutality of the arms and consumer industries, but also the repressed fears of the unconscious. Machine arms grasp flesh like prostheses, animalistic grimaces reflect primal fears, and the lines oscillate between technical precision and expressive dissolution.

These “traumatic constructions” are therefore not mere fantasies, but visual psychograms of an era: They address the experiences of alienation, threat, and transformation that are inextricably linked to the 20th century. The works combine human bodily experience, animal instincts, and mechanical logic into pictorial beings in which the uncanny becomes visible. Dr. Pelle Solus

Dr. Pelle Solus