MICHAEL WISMAR - ELEONORA PARADISE - HELGA RAIMONDI - VOLKER MÄRZ

On display are décollages, collages, mixed-media works, as well as objects and sculptures—four artistic approaches that engage with materiality, fragmentation, and form in diverse ways.

Between destruction and re-creation, the décollages and collages unfold a unique dynamic, while the sculptural works expand the space in their own distinct way. The exhibition opens up diverse perspectives on contemporary visual and formal languages and invites visitors to question familiar ways of seeing.

The exhibition runs through May 23, 2026.

Opening speaker Christoph Tannert described it beautifully:

“It is the concentrated power of the street that Michael Wismar and Eleonora Paradise have brought into the gallery… It is the visual sources from which a veritable barrage of colorful stimuli emanates. Both flood the rooms with the force of a ‘poetry of the metropolis,’ the likes of which was last experienced 75 years ago with the Affichistes.

The Affichistes (from the French affiche, meaning poster) were a small group of artists active from the 1940s to the 1960s who, as pioneers of street art and New Realism, used weathered billboards in Paris, Rome, and elsewhere as works of art (as poster decollages). Let us recall François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé, Mimmo Rotella, and Wolf Vostell.

Wismar and Paradise move with great enthusiasm through the playground of the avant-garde of yesteryear. They turn the everyday urban world inside out, process torn-down posters, and bring them back into the gallery or museum space. Metropolitan reality becomes a reservoir of material for them in a special way. The objects of everyday advertising, the “realia” of the seduction industry, become the medium of their art. However: stripped of texts and written messages.”