The work of Ida Tursic (b. 1974) and Wilfried Mille (b. 1974) expresses a deep engagement with today’s forms of image representation. Found in magazines and the enormous data pool of the internet, anonymous pictorial material is being transformed into the traditional domain of painting. Obscene pornography, film scenes of burning houses, landscapes as well as mere abstract and geometrical elements – the subjects depicted illustrate the common overload of image production circulating through present media. Often alienated by overlapping layers of paint or interrupted by various patterns these paintings deal with the manipulation, re-utilisation and disappearance of images.

“Tursic & Mille’s painting does not concern itself with subject matter or content; what it aspires to before anything else is to be an object. This object is, in fact, Painting.” Eric Troncy, ‘Tursic & Mille : Decade’, Les Presses du réel, 2011

Since they began collaborating as a duo in 2000, painters Tursic & Mille have been interrogating the contemporary overload of images and their relation with pictorial representation, questioning their reproduction, circulation and disappearance. Taken out of movies, magazines, media and the enormous repertory of data available on the internet, this boundless source of anonymous, preexisting material is used up and transformed into paintings. With their landscapes, erotica, portraits and abstract compositions, Tursic & Mille blur pre-existing hierarchies between all kinds of images, aiming to go forward with the history and genre of painting as it exists in the 21st century.

Tursic & Mille have been nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2019.