„waiting for connection…“

The works in Breyer's solo exhibition waiting for connection... thrive on the tension between closeness and detachment.

Elisa Breyer draws her motifs from personal archives, pop culture images and casual moments. Their transformation into paintings gives them a new dimension – a matte, almost digital sheen. Breyers' painterly vocabulary plays with shimmering colours and combines digitally inspired surfaces with the tactile materiality of oil painting. This raises the question: do these images reflect a ‘real’ world, or do they negotiate the impossibility of experiencing reality directly – in times of digital image aesthetics and staged Instagram realities?

There is a peculiar calmness in her painting style, a clarity that seems almost cool – like a detached tone that tells a story without imposing itself. It is precisely this that gives rise to a special intensity: the scenes keep us at a distance, do not allow us to enter completely, and thus create a space for reflection and projection. From this distance, the social stage on which belonging and self-presentation play out becomes palpable. Her figures move naturally in urban spaces, intuitively knowing which objects, gestures and codes embody a zeitgeist.

Breyer's portraits are embedded in pictorial spaces that function like still lifes. Objects appear repeatedly alongside the people, seemingly placed casually, yet revealing a great deal about their owners. They are not mere props, but references to social manners – testimonies to milieus, fashions, and the reality of urban life. The sushi on the edge of the bathtub, the wired headphones, the shiny sunglasses – these are not decorations, but markers of an attitude. Like a city apartment that almost furnishes itself, the images reveal a sense of the invisible rules that shape our present.

For young women in big cities, this means striking a balance between self-empowerment and conformity. The codes are mastered, used, playfully exaggerated – and yet remain part of a network that promises belonging but brings with it distance. With pop culture references – from Sex and the City to pop music – Breyer focuses on self-confidence as well as quiet moments of hesitation, authenticity and lifestyle performance.

This creates a state of limbo in waiting for connection...: the scenes are close, almost intimate, and yet unattainable. They tell of friendship and tenderness, of pop culture and urban reality – but also of the quiet doubt as to whether connection is even possible. At a time when life in big cities is increasingly characterised by consumption, disembodied communication and commercialisation, Breyer makes this cotton wool-like space visible – and at the same time sets out in search of connection. Perhaps it is precisely this ambivalence that makes Breyer's images so moving and beautiful.


‘waiting for connection...’ Elisa Breyer

11.09 - 11.10.2025
Galerie Gegen & Lücke
Wed-Sat 12:00 - 18:00
Opening: 11. 09. 18:00