KUNSTLICHT/Artificial Lighting is an exhibition of new work by Matthias Köster, Markus Lueder and Klaus Wanker.

MATTHIAS KÖSTER uses oil on metal to pay homage to Belle du jour, Fellini, La grande Bouffe. Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve make frequent appearances. He states, “Film series and film stills interest me as painterly strategies, allowing the picture itself to become a source of light. But never using white as light, never painting white into the picture. Cineatic space becomes a site of painting.” This manifests itself in not only the image, but in the style of his craft. “Over the past three years I’ve been working on aluminium. Oil on aluminium requires you to work quickly, and that suits me perfectly. All my pictures are painted “prima,” which means they’re painted in one go.”

MARC LUEDERS combines painting and photography to create a complex interplay between reality and illusion. In his Figure series, Lueders takes photographs of construction sites, abandoned parking lots, and occasional pastoral landscapes. He paints human figures directly into the scenes, copied from photographs of people that are furtively lifted from crowded city life – street corners, crosswalks and sidewalks. The new context is believable, but slightly off. The subject seems to wonder, “Where am I? What am I doing here?” Lueders goes even further, morphing the figures into pure gesture, painterly strokes. They feel equally valid and all the more disturbing.

KLAUS WANKER takes this street wear fashion world into his painterly focus. Fashion is perfection for the moment. It is the promise of uniqueness, of affiliation. You can’t abscond from fashion, especially when you’re young. In the centre of the fashion world stand the models filling it with life, only few of them as famous as the clothes they wear. Marketing and music have developed codes manipulating teenagers’ formation of identity. In his painted transference, Wanker inserts background with designs typical for exchangeable spaces such as club rooms, metro stations or music videos. He reduces the backgrounds to rudimentary geometrical forms presenting the “star” as placed in front of a light box backdrop. His choice of the frames, the emphasis on the faces closely related to the close-ups often applied in advertising photography stands in the same context.

These three German-speaking artists all take cues from media – sublimating, transforming the artificial into something new. We get to watch.