Æmen Ededéen United States, b. 1979
66 x 76 in
The title of the project references Hermann Hesse’s renowned novel The Glass Bead Game, in which the players exercise their in-depth scholarship to unearth elegant associations across the breadth of human knowledge. Begun in 2024, Ededéen’s Glass Dream Game follows a process that shifts between chance and deliberation, resulting in complex dream-like compositions. In each painting, the artist considers six images or texts from specific pages in his book library selected by means of an ancient divination practice I Ching. Echoing the idea that a personal library can function as a kind of portrait and reveal much about one’s experience, the Glass Dream Game is both an exercise in self-reflection and in divining the connections between disparate disciplines and images.
In Acausal Decoupling in Midnight's Jalopy (after Dubuffet), 2025, references to Jean Dubuffet's iconic work, Francis Bacon's portraits, and texts by Svetlana Boym and John Perkins, overlap and metamorphose into a dynamic composition at once imbued with humour and a meditation on the human condition.