Paul Glaw’s expressively, chromatically encoded works in orange and blue stage sceneries and moments of everyday life which he describes as symptomatical to his experience of the 90s and early 2000s in Halle/Saale since the German reunification. With a critical stance towards predominant narratives Paul Glaw explores these years for untold stories of people’s experiences of this time. His works talk about sorrows, anxiety, loss of social institutions, violence, lethargy, and the loss of individual and collective perspectives.
The use of ambivalence is central to his visual language and narrative strategy. With developing an iconography of his own and a signature style in a color code which is metaphoric in itself, Paul Glaw addresses questions of identity and alteration tightly linked to the heard and unheard histories of the reunification process and East Germany. „I realized because of my East German origin I am living in two worlds“, he states, and strengthens the perception of two societal realities and different ways of narrating history in Germany until today. Despite this autobiographical approach, Glaw emphasises that his addressing of sociopolitical exclusion and inclusion processes within societies is not limited to (t)his particular context of East Germany since the 1990s.
Paul Glaw lives and works in Leipzig. 2010–2015 he studied communication design with a focus on illustration in the class of Georg Barber at the Art Academy in Halle/Saale. 2015–2019 he completed his master studies in fine arts and painting at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK). In 2017, Paul Glaw won the Karl-Heinz-Ditze Scholarship in the field of new talent development. In 2020 Glaw received the working scholarship of the city of Hamburg and in 2021 the future scholarship of the Hamburg Cultural Foundation.