Starting in the early 2000s, Valentin Hirsch (b. Eschwege, 1978; lives and<br>works in Berlin) worked dot for dot to construct his monstrously graceful ink<br>drawings and etchings, a technique he compared to a tattoo artist's. In 2010,<br>he took the leap and switched from tracing paper to human skin. Drawing<br>into skin is an irreversible act. Hirsch's tattoos--he works exclusively in black<br>ink--eschew all pretense, but their existence is also bound to a body and a<br>life. The motifs in Hirsch's tattoos reflect this ambivalence of the medium:<br>beasts and shockingly comely skulls seem locked in confrontation or sprawl<br>into one another; lines and abstract forms posit sharply edged boundaries<br>that are otherwise alien both to life and to skin as an artistic material. Valentin<br>Hirsch's first monographic book highlights the transition from drawing to<br>tattooing<br>as an inevitable next step in his evolution as an artist. Essay by<br>Gunter<br>Damisch, interview with the artist by Uta Grosenick.