What is shown here is not so different. Many of the works are directly rooted in the lives of the artists. Specifically, in their spaces, bodies, and memories.

Artist Stephanie Keitz is interested in the things that surround us. The house, the space, and the skin in which we live. She translates this proximity into material: latex that is delicate, skin-colored, and vulnerable. In Los Angeles, she took impressions of her shower and created a sculpture that now lies in the exhibition space like discarded skin. Though it appears heavy and bronze, it is actually light. In another piece, Keitz stretches a relief of the historic floor mosaic of the villa like soft, latex skin across the wall. This poetic gesture quietly reveals the house’s former use as a children’s home.

Andreas Mühe, on the other hand, confronts the past head on. Power, myth, and masculinity are his themes. In his photograph Hitler, he presents an athletic, immaculately staged body that references and deconstructs the cult of heroes. In his large-scale work featuring toy soldiers, flags, and a fleeing sheepdog, he navigates the delicate balance between fascination and aversion to the military.

The cheerful, exuberant imagery of Christian Hans Albert Hoosen forms a counterpoint. In his large-format mural Soko Bonn, painting explodes in a colorful frenzy of comic figures, irony, and chaos. Hoosen, the initiator of the exhibition, chose his fellow artists not according to concept, but according to feeling.

Max Friesinger also plays with memory and order. Postcards from museums around the world hang in a strict grid pattern. Relics from his travels, combined with small, magnetically attached images. Ancient sculptures meet Damien Hirst’s skull. A humorous panorama of art history in miniature format.

As different as the positions are, they are connected by a common thread: reflections on proximity and distance, surface and depth, body and space. An exhibition that shows that what is “far away” is sometimes very close.