CLINT ENNS - Military Car Wash

Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 40 × 40 cm with 1 cm white border around the motif.
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 5 + 1 AP
Signed, dated and with an edition number by the artist on a separate label

Clint Enns – Military Car Wash

Soldiers in camouflage uniforms wash an olive-green car—a ritual of purity, staged like a choreography. The water jet forms a glittering dome, as if the goal is to wash away not only dirt, but also history and guilt. Yet the setting is banal: a car wash, somewhere between suburbia and a military base.

Enns takes up the aesthetics of propaganda only to empty it. The vehicle appears neither threatening nor heroic, but rather like a relic that has shed its aura in the routine act of cleaning. Here, war is not a battlefield, but a car wash.

The scene oscillates between comedy and seriousness: comedy because the martial pose in the act of washing the car seems ridiculous; serious because behind it lies a longing for normality – the idea that even violence and power can be washed away.