Beyond Eden

With their three positions, the exhibition’s artists shed light on different aspects of the notion of paradises and ideal worlds, and on the longings and projections associated with them.

Ariane Boss’s pictures show a world – colourful, lush, beautiful – in which the age-old longing for paradise finds expression.

Yet paradise in this world can only ever be a utopia. The dream of the distant ideal – although its existence is justified, important and beautiful – is condemned to failure and rupture.

In his works, Peter Freitag manipulates the beautiful appearance of images conveyed by the media. While his source material (advertising and star posters) has the unmistakable aim of awakening desires and longings in us, its commercial intent remains transparent and the promise of happiness inherent in it goes unfulfilled.

By perforating the promising surfaces of the world of images that surrounds us, his interventions interrupt the linear way these images work and so open up new spaces for association.

Mara Wagenführ’s pictures are permeated by ambivalence. Contrasts of form and content, relating to the painting itself and to the repertoire of imagery and its connotations, are characteristic of her pictures – a disturbing coexistence of a paradisiacal, childlike fairy-tale world and deadly symbolism.

“The work of art that remains enigmatic is the true work of art. It lives, makes demands, wants to be unmasked, and yet does not give up its last secret ... and it is not simply beautiful.”