BROKEN ROMANCE is the first solo exhibition by the artist Martin Mannig in the Berlin gallery Gebr. Lehmann.
The canvases of the Dresden based artist are heady image spaces that are opening up to visual chaos. In a colour intensive mash up, elements of German and Japanese folk art are being mixed with those of American comic and Japanese manga and are put in their own visual context. Figures taken from TV series, dolls and toys become models of Martin Manning’s figure cabinet.
Prior the figures are being developed as drafts. In a variety of variations the artist gets from figure studies to results, which then move on to the stock of his figure cosmos and thus receive their right to exist in his paintings.
Within a time consuming work process the artist combines several of those figures on canvas. The bodies and heads of his characters are matched up in a bizarre fashion and seem like painted collages. The figures are alienated and break out of their former contexts and thus mutate to some extent. In various layers the figures have to assert themselves within the composition – they are over painted, replaced and over layered by other figures and image elements. Thus a visual density develops within which the mutated monsters and comic characters drop into a narrative context via the various layers of the image and tell stories. Thereby the virtual romance or the innocence of the figures is overstressed and breaks.
The reason for the occupation with Japanese popular culture as a central topic in the artist’s new works are stays and journeys to Japan – especially in the year 2011, shortly after the Tsunami and after the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima. There the artist was directly confronted with the destructive effects of the natural catastrophe and the radioactive danger from Fukushima but also with the social and political belittlement of those problems.
For further information or images please contact us at berlin@galerie-gebr-lehmann.de Opening hours: tue - sat, 11 am - 6 pm
