Mirror Image

Sabrina Fritsch, Fabian Ginsberg, Christoph Knecht, Paul Maciejowski, Martin Schepers, Niels Sievers

The mirror and painting — in the history of art this connection goes back to 1434 with Jan van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Wedding.” In this picture, a convex mirror reflects the room, shows the bridal couple from the rear and the witnesses at the door; it is both a trick of perspective and a symbol of vanitas, recalling the transience of all things.

For the exhibition “Mirror Image”, Sabrina Fritsch, Fabian Ginsberg, Christoph Knecht, Paul Maciejowski, Martin Schepers, and Niels Sievers have painted figurative, representational, and abstract pictures. The six young artist have not staged a return to the traditional genres of painting; they have produced pictures of the people living today and their surroundings not by reproducing their appearance but by commenting on and analysing them through the act of painting, giving them a reality that is almost corporeal in the digital world of images. The exhibition investigates the old question whether the body is the mirror of the soul, and whether painting and colour constitute the mirror in which the painter and the observer can find themselves.