Paul Glaw: DOUBLE EXPOSURE

We are very pleased to present the new solo exhibition by Paul Glaw. In this exhibition, titled DOUBLE EXPOSURE, the artist presents new works from his diverse body of work, which includes painting, sculpture, and installation art.

Oversized fists rising on the horizon, masked protagonists, and striking weapons that transform into doubtful floppy balloons - Paul Glaw's chromatically coded works in orange and blue stage scenes and moments of everyday life that he describes as symptomatic of his experiences in Halle/Saale in the 1990s and early 2000s since German reunification. In his new exhibition DOUBLE EXPOSURE, we are once again immersed in Paul Glaw's expressive visual world, in which he narrates the immediate experiences of people since the 1989, at times with a critical stance, and makes them the protagonists of his pictures.

In his works, he addresses concerns and fears, the loss of social institutions, violence, lethargy, structural changes, and the rupture of individual and collective perspectives on oneself and the future. In confronting dominant narratives of our collective memory, Paul Glaw aims to give space to alternative and unheard stories. Central to this re-examination, or renewed and multiple exposure, is the use of ambivalences in his narrative strategy and visual language, as well as the development of his own iconography, which often cites elements from everyday life in the GDR or the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, as well as recontextualizing them in a cartoonesque and surreal manner. In doing so, he is concerned with conveying a more complicated image than the term 'reunification' singularly implies. In his latest works, Glaw expands his representation of figures to include imposing bodies that are bent in their proportions, stretched to flowing, in addition to the dimensions of both painterly and graphic characterization.

After Glaw having dealt with violence and aggressive masculinity in his previous series of works, his new works complement the approach with the question of the victim and (self-)victimization. While violence and pain were previously image-defining motifs, the instanf of crisis depicted now expresses itself in the fall, in moments of powerlessness and tipping over. In yet another chapter of his work, Paul Glaw addresses here the ambivalences of narrating, remembering, and perceiving German reunification and its after-effects, to the degree that he re-installs the human component into our possibilites at looking back and retrospect this most recent chapter of our history.