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AI generated: The image shows an art gallery with several colourful paintings on the walls. The room has a wooden floor and is brightly lit.
Exhibition

AURUM VANITAS

Painting by Christian Manss

22. Jan — 10. May

Location
Dresden Municipal Gallery
Wilsdruffer Straße 2 01067 Dresden
Opening hours
Tue - Sun / public holidays: 10:00 - 18:00 Alternative opening hours: 24, 25, 31 DEC: closed 01 JAN: 14:00 - 18:00
Admission
8 € per person | 6 € reduced Friday from 12:00 free admission Free admission with Dresden Pass and for children under 7 years and other discounts

Landscapes are often painted according to specific models - not so with Christian Manss. The artist invents his views completely freely. In a multi-stage process, he creates rocky, barren scenes from gold and black. He lets the colours run and partially erases them again. Geometric shapes appear as colourful foreign bodies on the horizon, push themselves into the pictorial space or stand abruptly in the landscape and thus question its existence. The gold seems precious, but is transient: AURUM VANITAS.

KI generiert: Das Bild zeigt eine Ausstellung mit zwei Gemälden, die abstrakte, goldene und rosa Farbtöne aufweisen. Der Fokus liegt auf dem vorderen Gemälde, während das hintere unscharf im Hintergrund erscheint.Blick in die Sonderausstellung | Foto: © Museen der Stadt Dresden, Philipp W. L. Günther

Since 2023, Christian Manss has been working intensively on the question of how landscape is created in painting - as a perceptual space, not as an image. His paintings are created without a photographic or real model. The depicted topographies are inventions: Spaces of possibility created by the interplay of surface and colour as well as movement and interruption.

The artist works with soft, sometimes transparent layers, allowing colour to settle and run. A central intervention within the painting process is the deliberate washing away of colour, not as a destructive, random act, but as a conceptual step: Christian Manss uses water to deliberately remove certain layers, open up new spaces and allow the picture ground to shine through again. In this way, he creates pictorial surfaces that are caught in a field of tension between construction and dissolution.

This method is combined with the integration of abstract, often geometric or block-like elements that enter into the imagination of the landscape. They lead a life of their own: they mark, irritate or rhythmise. In this way, a dialectical tension is created between surface and gesture, between construction and erosion, between image and imagery.

The titles of the pictures - such as "The last valley, then only peaks", "Black is the sea","Deep in the glass, the tapping loses itssound " - reinforce the impression that we are not dealing with concrete terrain here, but with conceptual anchors. They are offers for interpretation. Christian Manss himself speaks of "memory material" - something that is available to everyone and yet has no firm anchoring.

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By not showing real places in his paintings, but creating pictorial spaces that oscillate between real impression and suggestion, the artist refers to the possibility of viewing landscape not as a given reality, but as a construction - as a mental image. His painting is neither nostalgic nor purely constructive. It oscillates between gesture and structure, between ephemerality and substrate, between surface and space - and not least between a longing for nature and an awareness of its conception. These works are therefore more than just pictures: They are offers to look at, remember and discard. Places that exist and disappear at the same time. Once entered, they disappear again - like innocence.