BIG EATERS
From 13 June, Q Gallery Berlin will be presenting the monumental series GROSSE ESSER ( BIG EATER) by Berlin-based artist Alexander Dik. Through this series, the painter engages radically with the existential foundations of the human condition: hunger, desire, destruction and self-preservation. The idea of creating larger-than-life portraits of ‘eaters’ was not only a formal but also a substantive act of liberation – an assault on the conventions of portraiture as well as on the traditional rules of painting. With this series, the artist breaks through the boundaries of the classical painting process. After numerous attempts with the brush, whose expressiveness he found insufficient, he decided on a drastic step: he literally placed himself within the picture. With his feet, his whole body, he works on the canvas rolled out on the floor – an act of physical intervention that oscillates between destruction and creation. Trampling, dragging, kicking, he creates a raw, direct visual language that eludes all control and yet carries a deep clarity within itself. “I have to react constantly,” says the artist. “React to what is there, to my surroundings – and above all to myself.” The Grosse Esser are thus not static portraits, but vibrant snapshots of an inner and outer struggle. Man as a being in a state of emergency – torn between consumption and self-destruction, between carnality and transcendence. “Eat or be eaten,” says the artist – a guiding principle that echoes throughout the canvases. In these works, the act of eating, the eater, becomes a symbol of humanity itself, caught in an ongoing process of appropriation, waste and self-dissolution. The Great Eaters are thus not merely paintings – they are bodies, a stage, a battlefield. And at the same time, they represent an uncompromising stance within the contemporary discourse on identity, physicality and pictorial tradition.
Alexander Dik, born in 1983 in Kazakhstan, lives and works in Berlin. He is a painter and sculptor. His work moves between figurative abstraction, physical immediacy, and social provocation. His biography is marked by rupture, struggle, and a distinct cultural heritage: Dik descends from a Volga German family that was deported to Kazakhstan by the Soviet Union during World War II. This history of displacement, dispossession, and suppressed identity continues to shape his artistic stance – not as a literal narrative, but as a persistent resistance to forgetting.