Maike Freess THEATRE OF SOLILOQUY ⎪ September 4th – October 23rd 2020
Opening Reception: Friday, September 4th, 7-9pm

“There’s always a hole where something isn’t.”
Kurt Tucholski

The virtuoso drawing technique of the German artist Maike Freess is driven by an almost inexhaustible source of imagination and has an attractive, nearly brutal power.
It is not only the mere aesthetic pleasure of the first moment that draws the viewer into her works, but above all the engaging constellations of mysterious scenes.
Maike Freess works with various media: sculpture, photography, video, and installation, but her main field remains without doubt drawing.
The subject of her work is “humanity in its imperfect, limited and unstable nature, the relationship to oneself, to one’s surroundings, to other people and to society”. (1)
Her protagonists appear in pictorial spaces, or situations, in which nothing is certain, reality is not granted, as they would exist only in the suspension of an earthly moment between waking and slumbering, in which appearance and proportions are only suggestions. In her drawing process, the hidden, repressed or secretly desired is revealed. Fiction and reality mix together.

Her subject is the human psyche, which is exposed with all its ambiguities.
“Our inner theatre, the peculiar, the outlandish in everyday life, that which deviates from the norm is revealed. The invisible is made visible.” (2)
No images, no portraits or stories are invented.
Maike Freess creates images of human relationships and social rules that do not exist in the flesh. They are staged productions of our inner direction, expressions of manipulated subjectivity.
Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “Memory is capricious and bizarre, like a young girl: Now it unexpectedly denies what it has admitted a hundred times, only to return it when you stop thinking about it.”
In the series “The Heirs” Maike Freess alludes to the individual handling of our immaterial heritage, our cultural imprints.
The unwanted inheritance is inevitably part of our personality. It creates influence and unfolds the most diverse effects.
We cannot escape it and have to deal with it.
Heritage can become a burden or an advantage.” (3)

(1-3) Maike Freess