Facing the Future - Malerei • Zeichnung • Photographie
FACING THE FUTURE brings together ten international artistic positions, each reflecting a unique perspective on the world or the future—whether optimistic or bleak, realistic or sarcastic, personal or explicitly critical of society, looking back at history or sharply focused on the present.
The drawings of Dutch artist Irina Birger, with their artfully arranged, intricately crafted signal words, suggest that she is addressing her own emotional state, a momentary attitude, especially since the series they belong to is titled Irina Birger Says.
The cosmos of Cuban artist Yorjander Capetillo Hernández is surreal; his paintings resemble a sequence of theatrical scenes that, while not attributable to any identifiable play, resonate deeply with the absurd dramas of the Conditio humana, illustrating how political experiences shape human situations.
Portuguese painter Gil Heitor Cortesão depicts spaces of a world that seems hidden and abandoned. The melancholic atmosphere of his images refers to a past era that is not so distant, a time now associated with classical modernism and being rediscovered.
Through a magnifying glass and in well-composed snippets, Japanese photographer Satoshi Fujiwara examines our present, the violent reality of political struggles. Almost sculptural, every detail stands out, and even the smallest grain of matter feels tangible.
French painter and draftsman Philippe Huart mercilessly portrays the brutality of a reality that continually imposes itself, one we usually know only from the news—or from nightmares—and prefer to forget and suppress quickly.
In contrast, the new large-format photographic work by LawickMüller appears cheerful, airy, and optimistic. The artist duo Friederike von Lawick and Hans Müller captures a literally otherworldly, bustling Berlin beneath a radiant blue sky.
Korean artist Daecheon Lee virtuously combines traditions of Asian landscape painting with contemporary design elements in his softly colored, vibrant paintings, where often only upon closer inspection do threatening aspects emerge. Whether hinting at environmental destruction or the flash of warlike acts, the idyllic scenes reveal fractures.
Wolfgang Neumann is known for his sarcastic or ironic take on our media-saturated present, which he captures with painterly or drawn wit, bringing it to the point. Yet even he sometimes needs to pause and breathe: Je pense – I think, is written on one of his two new canvases.
The protagonists in the images of Russian-German photographer Alisa Resnik emerge from the darkness of night as if searching or lost, or they are on the verge of disappearing into it. The abandoned places and empty, lived-in spaces of this nocturnal world exude a dark poetry.
Joachim Seinfeld has discovered a sunken Berlin and not only preserved relics of the city's past from careless destruction but has also revitalized them—with memories of people who, long forgotten, suddenly appear ghostlike as images. On wall fragments from Berlin's rental houses of the Gründerzeit, he has applied private photographs of individuals who lived in the streets of Berlin when the houses were built.
The title of the exhibition, FACING THE FUTURE, can also be understood in a second sense: as a hint towards what is to come.
Six of the ten artists are being presented in our gallery for the first time, and certainly not the last.