In his works, the artist Manuel Frolik, born 1979 in Vogtland and now living and working in Dresden, poses questions of authenticity and authorship, and plays with our preconceptions about originals and forgeries. His process-oriented works are based on the appropriation and defamiliarization of "found footage", or rather of perfectly detailed reproductions of hyper-realistic or amorphous sculptural figures and objects.

Manuel Frolik
Pontederia cordata 1897 (Herbarium Dresdense), 2018
Digitalprint under acrylic glass
75 x 45 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Manuel Frolik, Dresden

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In her painting practice, Anke Völk is interested in aspects of surface, and of the dissolution of limits. She works with iridescent and metallic pigments, which she applies in countless layers on (newsprint) paper, canvas, mdf or an aluminium ground. Thereby, imperfections and the surface of the painting ground play an important role in her artistic technique. Flaws and small irregularities supply the texture of the artistic process; they provide orientation, and influence the work’s expressive content. During the creation and layering process, the artist consciously inserts such imperfections to visually explore how far these residual, visible traces point out that which, although missing, is still inherently present. The imperfections are traces of the painting process and belong to the finished image – just as the work’s other parameters, and its colours do as well.

Anke Völk
Untitled (Metallic Blue/Purple), 2017
Acrylic, cardboard on canvas
90 x 70 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Bernd Borchardt, Berlin

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With his cryptic series NULL HYPOTHESIS, Polish photographer Jan Cieślikiewicz creates a study in randomness. The name of his 16 part series derives from a hypothesis posited across scientific disciplines, which asserts that the link between two phenomena is random – the goal of the researcher is to disprove the null hypothesis and show that there is indeed a real, measurable link. In the series, Cieślikiewicz shows a range of apparently unrelated scenes, its title hinting at the difficulty, even impossibility, of proving a link between all of them. His work has an intriguing quality of timelessness and placelessness about it, to the extent that his images look as if they had been taken in an imaginary distant future, or a distant past, or even on a totally different planet. In an interview with LensCulture, the artist describes the challenges of our ‘post truth’ era: “I don’t think humanity as a whole can accept and genuinely come to terms with fundamental randomness and uncertainty, the lack of absolutes. At least not this edition of humanity, maybe the next one: Humanity 2.0…
Accepting this view of reality means letting go of everything. That’s a pretty scary concept, not having anything to hold on to, given the vastness of our life experiences. But I think an imaginary world, where we accept this idea as a given, would be a better one. Fewer opinions would mean less conflict. Less attachment would mean less pain. Personally, I’ve accepted all these things rationally. Emotionally, with my heart: that’s a lot harder. But I’m working on it.“

Jan Cieślikiewicz, Null Hypothesis, 2017
Archival Pigment Print

Courtesy: Jan Cieślikiewicz, New York and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Jan Cieślikiewicz, New York

Rona Kobel immerses reality in innocent white. With the aid of fine tableware that attempts elegantly to elude the explosiveness of everyday political events, the artist wants, as it were, to spit in our soup, to oversalt the food, and to ruin our appetite. War, terrorism and displacement, Islamism and right-wing extremism, Trump, Putin, Erdogan, and Brexit; everything is on the table, or rather in and on the dishes. In her current series of works, Kobel deals with our collective indolence in facing these pressing crises, and provocatively questions the stability and resistance of democracy and freedom in our world. A key work is Kobel's centrepiece 'Prop it, don’t drop it' (Civilization Bowl), which the viewer cannot simply click to close, or turn the page on, being thereby quickly able to put it out of mind, but must instead endure directly confronting it – an ambiguity reflected on the level of production aesthetics in the contrast between the fleeting instantaneousness of the underlying (media-) image, and the protracted process of porcelain production.

Rona Kobel, Prop it, don’t drop it, 2018 (Detail)
Porcelain, hand painted

Courtesy: Rona Kobel, Berlin and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Trevor Good, Berlin

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Thomas Judisch (*1981 in Waren / Müritz, Germany) steers our gaze to the firm reality of life of the “small, precious things” of the everyday world, and, with his work, puts a key for comprehending the world in its quite incidental beauty into our hands. One can view his works, which he has often presented as interventions in the museum context, with a twinkle in one’s eye, since the artist cultivates a playful, ironic handling of the material. In his works, nothing is as it appears. He skilfully plays the keyboard of optical illusions and art historical references and invites going on a parcours through our day-to-day world.

Thomas Judisch, Herakles von Hellersdorf, 2016
Concrete and steel

Courtesy: Thomas Judisch and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Thomas Judisch, Hamburg

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