dark days in paradise

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With Elisabeth Masé and Dietrich Walther, two artistic positions are represented in the exhibition “dark days in paradise” whose enigmatic and haunting works formulate fundamental questions from the most personal and whose visual languages find forms for the subcutaneous. They address an unease that shakes the often carefully maintained constructions of our ideas of happiness, childhood, family, security and social belonging.

Dietrich Walther’s paintings and collages are based on found photographs taken from the internet or from his own family albums. He digitally transforms this image material into stencil graffiti by separating background and figure, removing details and transferring the resulting distillate onto canvas. Walther thus detaches his figures from their original context of memory and their geographical location and at the same time makes room for a view of emotional interstices that, like eerie shadows, question traditional notions of happiness.
The people in his more recent collages, developed from internet selfies, seem displaced or uprooted – lost in a glaring new world. With these portraits from the digital present, Walther probes the sensitively disturbed relationship between public and private.

Elisabeth Masé’s artistic works revolve around the theme of protection and the need for protection and refer to a fundamental vulnerability of the individual and society. The figures in her paintings and watercolour drawings appear fragile and delicate. They appear and at times act cruelly – seducing and disturbing. As in a shiny spider’s web against a nocturnal black background, the drawing threads condense into dreamlike, traumatic sequences and portraits full of wondrous details. The often childlike creatures do not appear peaceful, but hurt, malicious and demonic, but in the midst of this melancholic mood there are flashes of subtle humour.
Elisabeth Masé’s artistic practice moves between drawing, painting, film, photography and literature. Since 2015, she has expanded this with her socio-political commitment and developed the highly acclaimed participatory art project “Das Kleid” (The Dress) together with refugees and women born in Germany, which is presented in the exhibition.

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