The exhibition featuring Paul Riedmüller and Max Freund brings together two artistic practices that have developed independently over the years, yet have been shaped by a continuous professional dialogue fostered by their friendship. Their first joint exhibition, held at the Horizont Gallery, allows these two creative approaches to be experienced side by side.
Although Riedmüller and Freund work with different painterly languages and image-making logics, their common starting point is the combination of painting’s material-centered, physical practice with the weightless, immaterial nature of digital image-making, as well as the interpretation of painting as a mental space. The exhibition focuses not only on these parallels but also on the contrasts between the images and within the pictorial space: structured and organic, digital and material, familiar and alien. Riedmüller’s pictorial spaces, rendered with technological precision, stand in sharp contrast to Freund’s paintings, which are organically organized from gestures and fields of color. A unique form of horror vacui is evident in the works of both artists. While Paul Riedmüller’s paintings appear as overcrowded, visually saturated pictorial spaces, in Max Freund’s works the impulse to fill the space becomes perceptible rather in the background layers of the paintings, as a more lyrical, structural saturation.
They draw their primary inspiration from their immediate visual surroundings, personal photo archives, found visual sources (books, textiles, flea market items), and internal images generated by the imagination. Analog and digital sources coexist, and as they overlap, they create an intermediate space where elements drawn from everyday material culture and digital imagery merge. The artists select, combine, and digitally transform these collected images — most of which are already mediated — according to their own logic, then regenerate them using painterly tools, thereby giving physical form to these transitional digital and mental images.
This is not about copying, but about intervention and appropriation, through which the tradition of painting is reinterpreted from the perspective of digital imagery. All of this reinforces the role of painting, as well as the physical presence and aura of images, in a visual environment dominated by screens. The paintings act as time capsules, condensing found visual elements that are enriched with new layers of meaning and time through the painterly gesture. The simultaneous presence of familiarity and strangeness creates an eerie effect that constantly increases and decreases the distance between the viewer and the work. The process, however, does not end on the canvas; the analog painting is eventually digitized again and returns to the cycle as an index image.
The title of the exhibition, *Guided Hands*, refers both to the traditional artistic gesture — the imprint of the hand — and to the issues of authorship and originality in digital and analog imaging. At the same time, it subtly hints at the interrelated creative processes, the intellectual and visual exchange between artists, and the presence of technology in image-making, along with its unique possibilities and limitations.
The paintings in the exhibition take their starting point from everyday objects and symbols, while evoking such time–honored genres of painting as still life and landscape. In these images, they appear not merely as representations but as mental and perceptual spaces in which the viewer finds themselves amidst familiar motifs and contradictory visual situations.
The dimensions of the canvases (160 × 120 cm, 100 × 80 cm, 30 × 20 cm) are deliberately linked to the exhibition’s concept. The standardized, commercially available formats emphasize the “ready-made” nature of the images, while the handmade, box-like design of the smaller works — created in the artists’ own studios — also evokes the concept of craftsmanship. These images, presented in a dual arrangement, create a more intimate relationship; their compact format evokes the act of viewing images on a screen. In contrast, the scale of the large-format paintings invites the viewer not merely to observe, but to “enter.”
As a spatial structure, the installation emphasizes the physical presence of the images. The stretched canvases are set slightly back from the plane of the wall, creating a floating effect. This solution not only reinforces the objectivity of the images but also creates a network-like system of relationships among them, in which the works function not as separate units but as elements in dialogue with one another. This system is held together by the rubber spider as both a physical and conceptual element. The rope introduces tension and resistance into the space while creating temporary, flexible connections between the compositions.
The exhibition visualizes everyday connections and situations — such as friendship, collective thinking, analog and digital imagery, and the relationship between the artwork and the viewer — in an immersive way, as a kind of extended perception of reality.
Maj Ajna