The starting point for the group exhibition ‘Painting as a Stage’ by Karen Holländer, Stefan Peters and Martin Schnur are three artists' positions that supposedly explore the possibilities of contemporary painting and scrutinise them on different image carriers.
Initially, the repertoire of various spaces and temporalities within the image carrier forms the basis of this exhibition, although each of the artists seems to deal with this differently.
Karen Holländer once again demonstrates the game of irritation by capturing the temporal in the image with the help of the repeated depiction of the figure. The habits of seeing are reduced to absurdity, whether through deceleration, which brings her protagonists to a standstill, or rhythm, which lends acceleration to her painting.
In his series theatres of the mind, Stefan Peters literally reflects on the theme of a stage-like quality in his painting. Like Holländer, he approaches the content of the picture by means of deception or alienation. Elements of everyday life suddenly appear in the middle of a picturesque stage landscape: climbing holds, coloured light bulbs or even ladders that lead nowhere - a surreal situation. By combining photorealistic elements in painterly backdrops, Stefan Peters explores and analyses the medium of painting.
In his new series Flying Mirror, on the other hand, Martin Schnur shows open landscape paintings that have a theatrical spatiality due to the demarcation of sharp edges, the different painterly foreground treatment of several surfaces in the picture and the shadows they cast. The play with light, the interest in the refraction of what is depicted and the clear cut fascinate Schnur anew in this series.
Last but not least, these are three different positions that are united by one thing in this exhibition in particular: works that have been realised in a grandiose painterly manner, which can tell a lot of stories and, in their ‘pure’ nature, put painting and its diverse creative possibilities as such in the spotlight.
