Part document, part photographic album, this artists' book by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys captures the sculptural revisionings of the descendants of an executioner family from Greifswald in the historical province of Pomerania.
These are images for individuals collated under the same condition or predicament. The bodies photographed in Die schmutzigen Puppen von Pommern (The Dirty Puppets of Pomerania) are weary, the clothing visibly worn in by history, their associated story line deadpan and fable-like. In the twelfth century, the executioner family monopolized the death sentences throughout the state and amassed a fortune through the management and maintenance of the gallow fields. At the height of their power, their empire covered the region of Greifswald to Stettin of present-day Poland. Their influence also extended to take a stronghold on the judiciary and its decision-making. After three generations in power, the empire suddenly and inexplicably collapsed. It was said that the frenzy of executions was the reason for the downfall; the family descendents left to roam Pomerania, relegated to a fate of taunt and mockery.
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys' book of images forms an allegory for human behavior under social and psychological pressure and exposes—as this artist duo readily do and do so aptly—the bankruptcy of humanity and not without humor, rendered in this case through pose, dress, and bodies awaiting animation.
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys have been working together as an artist duo since the end of the 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects, and videos—steeped in black humor, critical (self)-reflection and overlapping reality, fiction and suppressed history—play with notions of the superficial and banal.
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys's art casts a merciless perspective on reality. Through their numerous artistic approaches, the artist duo visualize their imaginings of the parallel world inherent within the modern human psyche, along with how it manifests itself in the everyday aspects of life and civic conformity. Everything from work, leisure, and family, to social class, masculinity, and marginalization are envisaged through convening an unlikely cast of nonprofessional actors, family members, friends, beards, objects, and mannequins alike, often in banal, homespun settings rife with awkward power dynamics.
