interview / liz rice mccray
Some start small; Tobias Kroeger started rather large. Inspired by the New York City subway graffiti’s of the 1990’s, he sprayed his first works of art in his hometown of Bremen, Germa-ny at the age of 12. Kroeger spent his youth exploring the boundaries of the genre. Out of the typical imagery of graffiti, he developed his own iconography and eventually transported this style on to classic canvas in 2013. His focus has been on using oil and acrylic paints. Kroeger has catapulted the classical portrait, in which he often inserts quotes, into the digital world of ones and zeros. When speaking about his works, Kroeger talks about data fragments and machine elements of heteronomy and life dreams that have little space under the conditions of mechanization and, therefore, get lost in standardized conditions.