25.04. - 15.06. 2024
In this edition of Image to Image, we extend our platform to connect with our current exhibition, Dominik Lejman - Step Aside.
Dominik Lejman is known for his innovative hybrid works that emerge from the fusion of chiaroscuro-painted canvases and video projections. For creating his unique visual realms and redefining the medium of painting, Lejman was awarded the prestigious prize of the Akademie der Künste in 2018.
For the project titled Reenactment Lejman started a collaboration with the British performer and model Bianca O’Brien. Initially created as part of the off-Venice Biennale pavilion "Madnicity” in 2022, the series displays a constructive discourse on stereotypes and common beliefs about mental disorders. With themes cantered around the concepts of control, manipulation, and submission to beauty cannons, Reenactment also deals with the distinction between normality and insanity as well as the marginalization of those we judge to be mad. Lejman paired up his paintings with ephemeral ghostly scenes of a female figure, based both on religious representation in art history and photographic archives of the former mental hospital at San Servolo. The body is being presented as an object, directed frontally by a pair of hands, wrapped in a white cloth reminiscent of a straightjacket – a cloth taken directly from the Baroque tenebristic painting. Set within a black void that lend his work a certain baroque quality, his figures often appear like dolls or puppets that remain mostly passive in their own actions. The ephemeral projection emphasize the innovative hybrid form of Lejman’s works – stressing the absence of representation. Leaving behind the canvas to be looked at, ‘the projected absence’ makes it evident that the painting is far more than just the projection surface