How it all began
No one would guess it today
, but in its beginning Akt mit Pferd had once been a joke.
To be able to explain the full genesis of Nude with Horse you have to tell the following story:
In 2014 Jens Maria Mayer and Beni von Alemann had been living for already some years in a shared apartment in Berlin Kreuzberg at the border to Neukölln. In that same house lived, by chance, a former fellow student from Weimar, with whom they have been close friends ever since – by the way, the lady on Nudes with Horse #126 to #153/10,000. This neighbor friend traveled from time to time and sublet her apartment on occasion. The two not-yet-artists (but rather just bohemians) had a key to the apartment, because sometimes several tenants would come one after the other while their neighbor was gone. In those cases one of the two would visit the apartment, put fresh sheets on the bed, aired the curtains and put new flowers in the vase.
Once Jens Maria, after visiting his parents’ house, brought back a painting from his high school art class, which was a classic art motif: a female nude sitting on a bed, her back to the viewer, framed by two curtains, painted by him as a teenager in oil on a large canvas, thus a masterpiece. And one time while taking of the flat, the two co-living friends hung said painting in her neighbour’s living room without further notice, awaiting a reaction – that never came. Did the friend think a guest had left the picture as a tip? Did she know it was them and was secretly plotting revenge? In any case: when she was out and about again another time and another lodger was about to move in, and while watering the flowers the two found the picture behind a cupboard and hung it up again. After the return of the girlfriend again no comment. It went like this a few times.
Then on November 17, 2014, Mayer and von Alemann were invited to their girlfriend’s birthday for a drink in the neighboring apartment and even until the very last minute they didn’t have a proper gift for her. What they did have lying around was a stretcher frame from a thrift store covered with white canvas and the running-gag backstory referring to that painting.
It was one of those rare moments when fate finally ties some already restlessly spinning threads into one unbreakable yarn. Without a doubt the only possible motif for the blank canvas to be filled could be a female nude sitting on the bed, her back turned to the viewer, framed by two curtains, precisely applied to the canvas with a sharp marker by Mayer. In order to contribute something, too, von Alemann, following some random instinct, added as his contribution a hobby horse standing in a vase. But wasn’t there still something missing in order to give this painted one-euro canvas even more value? Indeed! So, spontaneously, they attached a serial number in the middle of the picture – right next to their signature, elegantly integrated into the drawing – which was supposed to hint far into a future, of which they obviously still knew nothing at that time and marking it as the very first of great things to come:
Handing over the picture of this new nude revealed of course the mystery of the old one. But no one suspected that a seed had been planted that day, which would secretly grow for another year, because time, in art as in life, can be a powerful ally.
Three hundred and sixty-five days later, birthdays and drinks were repeated, this time on a small scale. In addition to the celebrant, there were the two artists and only one other, well-trusted friend of the three. At one point attention was drawn to the gift from the previous year, the drawing with a nude and a horse, which at the time still had no name and which was now taken down from the wall and examined in great detail.
Some ideas have to mature for a while, like sourdough or yeast, pickles, a good wine or a secret waiting to be revealed. And just as pressure is created during the maturing process in closed containers, the champagne cork of this idea popped fulminantly when the sudden “what if” of the actual implementation of this mad series resulted in one word leading to another. “What if we actually drew these 10,000 pictures?”, “Can there ever a better name than Nude with Horse?” and “How much would a picture cost?”
Getting serious about act with horse. At the latest after the impoverished artists used Gauss’s sum formula to calculate the total sum of a series of 10,000 pictures, the first of which would cost one euro and the tenth thousandth ten thousand euros, the decision to implement them was no longer a question. The two friends present bought the first ten nudes with horse within seconds and before they were painted. While joking, one almost snatched the domain aktmitpferd.de, which had suddenly become valuable, but was prevented from doing so with kind words. They toasted to their first successful sales and the birth of Akt mit Pferd. The rest is art history.