R.C. hoffmann paints twitter portraits in photorealistic series

R.C. hoffmann paints photorealistic twitter portraits
all images courtesy of R.C. hoffmann

having just made its wall street debut, social media platform twitter has over 232 million users worldwide, and the series ‘twitter portraits’ by german artist R.C. hoffmann are a seemingly random collection of user profile pictures taken from the online network. cropping, expanding and manipulating the small, low-res jpeg-files the images are painted in oil on coarse, unprimed canvas, creating pictures that appear photorealistic at first glance. the portraits question regular viewing habits, which users have unconsciously adopted to digital photography and the stamp-sized images that flood the web create a binary distortion and loss of detail caused by this compression with image processing barely noticed. it is not only at the binary level of the data packets that the edges are blurred, it is often difficult or impossible to detect, if that photo is authentic, and even if it is, if the person using it is the person he or she claims to be or simply an imposter.

‘are these really the bare feet of bret easton ellis, author of ‘american psycho’? is the asian boy really a photo of ai weiwei as a child? while these questions can still be answered, the bathing girl in ‘anonymous (follower # 3)’, who’s photograph was presumably secretly taken, will reveal neither her identity, nor the photographer’s, nor the identity of the spammer that used her picture.’ says R.C. hoffmann.

maison martin margiela

richard prince

ai weiwei 

unknown (follower #3)

addie wagenknecht

bret easton ellis 

marcus fischer

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