The exhibition title is already a multilayered game with the notion of the black mirror, which in recent art theory has become one of the central allegories of the monitor-, and display-centric reality experience of the present. The perception of our reality is not separable anymore from the digital image culture which is transmitted through the touchpads of smartphones and displays of portable devices, even if these often manipulative transmissions are more and more opaque.
But Gerhes is not only referring to this black mirror in the title of his exhibition, but that one as well, which was used in 18th century English landscape painting. The black concave mirror changed the tonality of the natural colors, making the experience of nature more painterly and picturesque according to the artistic standards of the time.
That black mirror was named after French painter Claude Lorrain and is often referred to as the Claude Glass or Lorrain Glass. This depth of the notion of the black mirror explains the use images of nature and the allusions to antique and classical art together with the contemporary reexamination of the role of beauty and the sublime.
The exhibition of Gerhes also reflects on the broad social experience of the failure of humanism and the modern human ideal. In connection to this the artworks also refer to the emptiness of the notion and the status of work, that the slogans of the efficiency