In his exuberant images and spatial installations, which are sensory overload due to their abundance of motifs, Slovakian artist Andrej Dúbravský (born 1987, lives in Bratislava) presents a sensitive yet critical study of our environment and its progressive destruction. The visual cacophony echoes countless emotions and their often vociferous expression, making it almost impossible to concentrate and focus on the individual voice, the isolated image, and reflecting the digital, media overload with which we are confronted on a daily basis. The artist refers to an unresolved tension between man and nature, depictions of idyllic landscapes and male sexuality. The muted colors appear almost conservative until the viewer notices the contemporary and post-traditional context in which the paintings are set. His broad art-historical repertoire is reflected in his most recent works, which deal with contemporary versions of classical subjects - sometimes very seriously and conscientiously, sometimes with distanced irony.

Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg (born 1987) lives in Berlin. By combining industrial processes and regional arts and crafts with elements of pop culture, Dunkelberg's works dismantle the fetishistic status of modernity and attempt to re-evaluate historical, patriarchal narratives from a contemporary perspective. The subject, particularly the female subject, began to behave in new ways at a certain point in the European past (Bynum 1991, p. 195). In her sculptures and objects, which oscillate smoothly between volume and flatness, the sculptor examines the cultural aspects of its contemporary emancipation. This is far from being a fixed, natural entity. Instead, it takes on a transformative, sometimes ambivalent character and re-produces itself. The solemnity of Dunkelberg's works, reminiscent of the glam aesthetic of the 90s, is a symbol of his power and his position.

Based on her own memories of certain places, Nao Kikuchi (born 1988, lives in Karlsruhe) creates narrative sculptural scenes. These reflect a longing for distant places. The artist focuses primarily on architectural motifs such as windows, doors, curtains and fences, which mutate into metaphors for “open portals” that, as she herself says, point the way to the distant world. Using ceramic or terracotta and spray paint, she creates delicate, filigree, ornamental shapes and structures with a fragmentary character, unstable elementary particles of a whole that is not recognizable at first glance. Her minimalized and minimalist wall works also have the iconic charm of Japanese writing culture. Nao Kikuchi sees her preoccupation with architectural ornamentation, which reflects regionality, history and craftsmanship, as a search for a visual language to express non-verbal narratives in a contemporary art context. Her works with detailed surfaces and foreshortened forms begin to flicker and shimmer in our eyes after a while, reminiscent of falling stars from the cosmic universe. Or of a world that has come apart at the seams.

The stylish painter and poet Kornel Leśniak (born 1999, lives in Krakow) wouldn't be who he is if it weren't for the girl-girl trend and his soft-spirit. Power in the outfit - Guilty Please for Ever. The color blue - dominates his symbolic space and means philosophy of life. Blue ciel, blue nuit or blue electrique, recently also acid yellow and sweet pink are Lesniak's protégés. Pearly tears, the girly and glittery determine the aura of his mostly sad and melancholy (self) portraits - paintings. They often return our gaze and evoke a quiet feeling of unease or alienation. Lesniak's portraits are either superhuman or heroic. With him, new values and ideals fill the symbolic space and not a collective delusion. His formations are on the scale of today's means of cultural production and its dissemination, i.e. the mass media: charismatic disembodied memes with the artist's likeness that live in online space and stimulate our imagination in a way that creates a profound emotional bond with an imagined community. Lesniak is an artist who, in the poetics of the spectacle, creates a new kind of mythical, magical figures that seem to proclaim: I care, therefore I am. Is this an attempt at a reckoning or simply the confrontation of the (queer) subject with the soulless reality that surrounds us?

In his work, Michael Part (born 1979, lives in Vienna) sheds light on the historical and technical conditions of photography and explores its media limits time and again. He experiments with chemicals and physical test arrangements and consistently questions the nature of the photographic image. In his explorations, driven forward with an almost scientific spirit of research, he cultivates a broad artistic field into which the entire range of photographic imaging finds its way. Precise but open-ended and full of curiosity, he uses direct and long exposures, daguerreotypes and silver gelatine processes to create fascinating, often restrained, but nevertheless poetic “paintings with light”, which not least also visualize the history(ies) of photography and its pioneers. Parts of the inkjet prints of scanned transmitted light material (slides) shown in the exhibition depict small parts of plants, only about the size of a fingernail. The plants themselves are random and originate from the artist's plan to grow turmeric. The soil he used for this was full of various seeds that sprouted and he then worked intensively with them. He separated them, repotted them, sorted them and harvested small pieces of them, which he then press-dried. The images are then produced on film material without a camera or other photographic instruments in the course of a production process based on photograms. The final works do not show factual images of the plant parts, but rather photographic approximations of them.

The painter and photographer Sophie-Luise Passow (born 1994, lives in Vienna) plays with the ambivalence that painting shows the whole world and at the same time hides everything.At the same time, she reinforces this ambiguity by imaginatively staging what is invisible to our eyes in everyday life. If we regard painting as an “open window”, then in the case of the Viennese artist it is not directed at the outside world, not even from a different angle, but instead provides a view of what lies beyond our reach: under the skin, behind the veils (painting as velum), inside the body. The moving abstract-geometric forms and ornamental, repetitive patterns that Passow has found or invented, sometimes interwoven with dynamic black lines, bear titles from biology such as RNA, mitochondria or karyotype. Her pictorial inventions are intended to reflect the transformations of complex systems that take place in biological organisms. With her vivid, sometimes exotic and demonic color palette and the blurred, phantasmagorical effects and deformations inspired by the textiles in the MAK collection, Passow captures our attention and awakens our desire to see. The lack of a frame on her paintings makes them appear “light, delicate and fragile” and gives them an air of authenticity, while in reality they are “resistant, robust and adaptable”. They reveal the systemic illusionist evils of late capitalism: it seems as if Passow's images are more attractive doubles than the originals of the objects, processes or phenomena they name.