Polish artist Dominik Lejman has been hunting ghosts for three decades. Exhibited worldwide, his art superimposes video images onto abstract paintings. The paintings are briefly inhabited by revenants and phantoms a disturbing art of alignment, imprisonment and fall. Curated by Hubertus von Amelunxen, the exhibition at St. Matthäus Church in Berlin shows around 20 works from the period between 1995 and today.
The Epiphany season, during which the exhibition takes place, is the time of God's appearance in the world: time and eternity interpenetrate each other. In Dominik Lejman's works, people fall out of time into the joints of the present – a paradox. They are phantoms, belonging to no time, but recurring in every time. Thus, viewing his pictures becomes a haunting experience in which the ambivalence of the familiar and the uncanny is revealed; imprisonment and paradisiacal longing. ‘The time is out of joint,’ says the ghost to Hamlet.
Although obsessive, Lejman's work follows the aesthetics of human existence, its orientation, with a careful mixture of doubt, humour and despair. Like a pendulum, his work swings between revelation and repulsion, elevation and fall, Elysium and dungeon. In a unique combination of content, media transmission and aesthetics, Dominik Lejman has shaped the question of the possible in the absurd.
Being haunted by phantoms means remembering something we have never experienced in the present. Dominik Lejman's work thus raises the urgent question of how we deal with our presence and our time, and with what responsibility.
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive programme of events including readings, choreographies, performances and lectures.
