In consequence of having seen my graphic series ”The Plague“ at the Heike Arndt Dk Gallery Berlin, another Berlin based gallerist, Tom Albrecht, from the GG3 Group Global 3000 Gallery invited me to take part in an exhibition under the title “Corona and Climate Crisis”. This gallery has committed itself to a comprehensive sustainability concept for all aspects and sectors of art.

Being invited to a gallery to produce an artwork under given strict sustainability criteria instead of offering my already existing objects of art, it occurred to me that it would be apt to create new art by upcycling the remainders of my last exhibition (“The Plague I”) into works of art under the new title “The Plague II”. The remainders of ”The Plague I” were 600 leftover flyers from ”The Plague I” exhibition printed with the motive of my hand-drawn desert locust and informative text in form of double sided printed postcards in the format of 10 x 20 cm.

I kicked off the “Plague II Project” by cutting out around 400 desert locust motives from the recent flyers and upcycled them into three new three-dimensional objects of art under the title “The Plague II – 1”, “Plague II – 2”, “Plague II – 3” by using the artistic technique of a collage of the cut out desert locust motives by sticking and clamping them together on a basis of white cardboard and the leftover postcards from which I had cut out the desert locust motives before. Hence, the single prints of the hand-drawn desert locusts could be arranged intentionally to form a series of three vivid three-dimensional objects of art in the format of 70 x100 cm each, depicting 3 different stages in the movement of a desert locust swarm, thus mirroring the simultaneous double effect of deadly horror and utmost fascination, which is one of the impacts of the real desert locust plague. This plague, which extended from Kenia via Jemen and the Arab Peninsula towards Pakistan, hit the poorest the hardest in 2020, coinciding with the worldwide plague of the COVID-19 pandemic.