Grootvader Engel (Grandpa Angel), 1962

Private Collection, Quebec

Alexander Dumbadze, Bas Jan Ader: Death is Elsewhere, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2013, page 9

Bastian Johan Christian Ader was a performance artist, conceptual artist, and photographer. Grootvader Engel (Grandpa Angel) is an early work of Ader’s. While studying at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, he shifted his area of study, as Alexander Dumbadze writes: “While at Otis, Ader began to study photography. This marked a shift from his previous work, which had consisted mainly of muddy, gestural paintings in the figural abstraction vein. These pieces had won him a fair amount of success.” He would become famous for his “Falls” series of films and photographs, in which he would document himself falling. One of his most poignant works was “I’m too sad to tell you” where he documented himself crying in a 3 minute film and in photographs for no apparent reason. A mystery surrounds his death/disappearance in 1975, while undertaking the second leg of a three-part work In Search of the Miraculous, in which he set sail from Massachusetts for England, his boat was found a year later but his body was never recovered.