Homestories

Katherine Bradford | Romane de Watteville | Christina Forrer | Atsushi Kaga | Norbert Schwontkowski

The exhibition HOMESTORIESbrings together various artists whose work oscillates between staged fiction and personal reality. Through moments from everyday life, suggestive and multidimensional images are created. The surfaces thus become a stage transmitting narratives that can be both disturbing and disquieting. This dynamic enables the observer to see himself from different perspectives and to gauge boundaries. Ultimately, however, it is not the image or the protagonists that are foregrounded; rather, they are to be understood as painterly metaphors for the emotional and intimate spaces that lie behind them, reflecting not only the personal queries of the artist, but opening up evenly across time, age, gender, skin color and attitude, posing questions not only about our own vulnerability, fears, dreams and hopes, but also about belonging and togetherness in the family, in contemporary society as a whole. The allegedly childlike naiveté underlying the works and the seductive col- or palette suggest a lightness and innocence, but this only serves to poke straight into the core without further ado.