Petra Rietz Salon Galerie | FACTS AND FABRICATIONS – Paula Muhr & Hans Könings

Opening hours
Thu-Sat 15.30-18h, and by appointment

FACTS AND FABRICATIONS is the first joint exhibition by Paula Muhr and Hans Könings. The title of the exhibition points to the common ground between these two very different artistic personalities. Their works turn facts into artifacts. They transform historical data into personal stories, that reinterpret facts as symbolic constructs.

Paula Muhr’s new work La fatica (Fatigue) investigates various historical and contemporary strands of medical research, which focus on stress, fatigue, depression and psychosomatic problems. Muhr references the research of the celebrated 19th-century Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso. Through her images and objects, she links Mosso’s investigation of muscular fatigue and nervous exhaustion to contemporary medicalisation of mental disorders. The multimedia installation comprises photographs, a video, texts and objects. Muhr’s work examines the late capitalism’s increasing entanglement of the individuals’s productivity with his/her physical and menthal health. La fatica (Fatigue) analyses how personal misery becomes increasingly viewed as a form of social dysfunction, which needs to be quantified, classified and effectively managed.

In his impressive series of linocuts Hans Könings reflectes both on his own and foreign myths and memories. The photographic templates which his work is based on, are taken from the media, found at flea markets or come from his own biographical fundus. Könings is a treasurer hunter. He incessantly searches for and discovers the secrets of pictures and their underlying stories by freeing the appropriated photographs from their original contexts and translating them into linocuts and woodprints. Owing to this transformation, all characters and events in his work are fictionalised. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or to happenings in the past or future remain purely coincidental.

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