Painting Under Pressure: 3 Exhibitions at Kornfeld

This is not a group show but three autonomous experiments testing how painting operates under compression:

from digital velocity, spatial immersion, and cinematic colonization.

Together, they address the image crisis of late capitalism: Sebastian Maas through historical sampling, Philip Grözinger through immersive spatialization, the 69salon collective through cinematic mediation, probing whether painting can still generate friction in an economy designed to eliminate it.

Their spatial politics diverge radically:

the white cube as site of durational attention; total environment where the body inhabits rather than observes; intimate salon redirecting the gaze toward narrative. Each tests how who looks and under what conditions can be renegotiated.

At stake throughout is temporality and attention:

What happens when painting absorbs the velocity of scrolling and forces it through material viscosity? When the canvas becomes spatial and the viewer loses the stable ground of contemplation? When the cinematic apparatus – history's most powerful technology of identification – is slowed into embodied labor? Painting is thus positioned as counter-practice to digital acceleration.

Finally, all three interrogate the body and spectatorship: Maas disrupts inherited ways of seeing, exposing how deeply desire is structured by visual history; Grözinger immerses the body in a hallucinatory world where excess and collapse oscillate; the 69salon artists explore cinematic embodiment to ask who controls the camera, who is framed, who speaks.

KORNFELD Galerie

Sebastian Maas, Seduce me

At KORNFELD Galerie, Sebastian Maas presents new paintings that navigate the tension between painterly tradition and contemporary image culture. His works sample fragments from art history and combine them with current, pop-cultural visual motifs. Painting becomes a site of transformation, where art history meets the visual language of the present and traditional ways of seeing are disrupted.

68projects by KORNFELD

Philip Grözinger, Manntje, Manntje, Timpe Te

At 68projects, Philip Grözinger expands painting into the spatial realm. His exhibition unfolds as an immersive total installation in which paintings, sculptures, and everyday objects form a walk-in visual world. Inspired by the Grimm fairy tale, Grözinger explores the fragile balance between desire and reality, reflecting states of society oscillating between excess and collapse through his “virtual surrealism.”

69salon by KORNFELD

Eugénie Didier, Roxana Halls, Christine Brey, Viktoriia Oreshko, Popcorn and Pickles

69salon presents a group exhibition featuring four international artists who explore the experience of cinema, translated onto the canvas. In a present shaped by images and digital visibility, the viewers’ gaze is redirected toward personal narratives and perspectives of our time. The works oscillate between attraction and unease. Whether (hyper-)realistic or surreal, each artist’s distinct visual language opens new perspectives on the perception of the body and identity.