MINDKISS – Voyages of discovery in OUBEYs art

Imagine somebody you don't know sends you an email asking you to talk about a painting you’ve never seen by an artist you’ve never heard about – with the proviso that all this will be filmed and the video of the encounter published later on in the internet. How would you react? 

You might think that this question is hypothetical? Not at all. Because the “somebody you don’t know” was me at the beginning of the MINDKISS Project. 

And the end result of emails of this type that I sent out is extraordinary: a set of Encounters with OUBEY.

Camera on! 

The idea of the “Encounters“ goes like this: someone views a painting by OUBEY they’ve never seen before and talks about the thoughts and feelings this painting inspires in them – in front of a running camera. Nobody knows which picture they’re going to see. And the painting remains covered until that camera starts to run. It’s a totally new form of spontaneous interaction between painting and viewer – fresh, unconstrained and original. 

I am constantly amazed and thrilled by the sheer richness of the thoughts, insights and discoveries that have emerged from the 25 Encounters with OUBEYs paintings. To give just one example, when a palaeontologist of the calibre of Professor Friedemann Schrenk of the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt remarks that a whole 7 million years of human evolutionary history is contained in the painting he is viewing, this is a truly astonishing statement that neither I nor probably anyone else could have made. , It’s a unique and truly brilliant insight. 

New dimensions

When I first took up the Encounters I fully realised that with its many long-distance journeys to people all over the world this was going to be a huge, time-consuming and very expensive project – yet at the same time one that also offered marvellous one-of-a-kind opportunities for OUBEYs art and for my own life.  

For the Encounters are not just about other people viewing one of OUBEYS paintings, for me they are also always fascinating encounters with these interesting people. I got to know scientists and researchers, musicians, dancers and extreme athletes and through them became familiar with quite new perspectives on OUBEYs art. In the shortest time, my life became enriched by many new dimensions.  

The MINDKISS idea

You can find out what they are and how I first hit on the idea for the MINDKISS Project in my new e-book MINDKISS: Following OUBEYs Tracks. Download it, it’s for free.