Bowie Dissolving Into Berlin

Half of the face rises out of the dark. The other half is already leaving, drawn apart into a wall of fragments, rubble, wire, torn structure, the bones of a divided city. This is Bowie in Berlin, the years he came here to disappear and found himself instead.

The eye that remains looks straight through you. It is the only fixed point in a portrait that refuses to hold still. Around it, the man breaks into architecture, as if identity itself were something built, and something that could just as easily come apart brick by brick.

No paint. No print. No ink. The face and the ruin around it are scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, controlled surface damage standing in for pigment. The image is not applied onto the surface, it is cut from it, present the moment you look and unchanged by the room around it.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it. Under a direct source the scratches catch and the contrast deepens, the debris field gains weight and shadow, the eye holds its ground. Move around it and it reads differently from every angle, the face never lost, only reframed.

From across a room it reads as a single monumental portrait, half man, half wreckage. Up close it dissolves into a field of countless individual scratches, a surface that was taken apart to put a person back together.

Bowie Dissolving Into Berlin continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print. This work is unique.

"He came to a divided city to find the part of himself that was still whole."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

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