About — Felix Bode Artist

Felix Bode

About

Felix Bode, a 2024 graduate of the BA in Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, is a Berlin-based artist whose practice delves into the growing space between figuration and abstraction— the counterpart of the fading connection humans have to the material world. The monumental paintings exhibited during the Degree Show, a reflection on the detached inner gaze of travelers lost in thought, won the RSA New Contemporaries Award and the Arts Thread Global Graduate Award 2024.

Contemporary life exists in an era where proximity can be regulated according to the individual desire. Technology has blurred the limits of time and space, making distance become increasingly abstract. The paintings of Felix Bode engage with this abstraction both formally and conceptually. They explore the tension between the illusion of closeness and accessibility, as suggested by modern life, and the more complex reality where certain distances remain unattainable.

Through a nuanced and deliberate use of the medium, the artist incorporates in the same composition both an illusionistic and a diagrammatic style of painting. The works present a strong sense of spatiality: they draw the viewer in, make them part of the painterly universe and wake up new perceptual possibilities. In this sense, they effectively give form to the concept of distance. At the same time, Felix Bode uses a painterly style that distils complex images into simplified, often schematic forms, emphasising the structural aspect of distance as an abstraction. The painterly strategies involved in this process vary from heavily saturated turpentine layers to thick impastos, with the artist skilfully alternating between positive and negative marks in a method that has its roots in printmaking. Through editing, projecting, painting, wiping away, repainting, the image changes under the hands of the artist, while holding a trace of what was originally seen.

The concept of distance and the strain created by modern life interfaces are becoming more important as our accelerationist society injects new forms of discrepancy. From the aerial views seen from a plane, to landscapes of fields, factories and cities that pass by at high speed through the window of a train, to the underground stations spotted on a daily commute, the works evoke a blankness and a sense of losing touch with one’s environment. The fleeting nature of modern images highlights the paradox between a seemingly accessible world and novel distances: diasporic identities that navigate the pull of multiple home lands, the inescapable routine of long travels when living in a city, the burden of long-distance relationships, the systemic barriers that prevent some people from enjoying the same experiences as others. Distance as such is not only a matter of physical separation, but also a structural condition on how one moves through space and relates to the world.

In capturing both the illusion of nearness and the persistence of disconnection, the paintings of Felix Bode offer reflection on how distance—once purely geographic—has become an existential condition of contemporary life.