Memory. Painting by Martin Mannig

For Martin Mannig's work, it is not only the protagonists of his personal cosmos of images that are important, with which he unfolds a potpourri of figures familiar to us from folk art, fairy tales, comics, independent films or even as tattoo motifs. Martin Mannig also consciously and precisely develops the formal principle of his compositions, mixing, organising, uncovering and juxtaposing the pictorial elements. While he stages the individual figure as a portrait in the small format, he places figures on large canvases, like data on a memory chip, adding new ones or overwriting old ones. Perceptible as layers and erasures, dense visual worlds emerge, similar to the memories in our memory, sometimes vague and blurred, at other times clear and distinct.