Lukas Salzmann - in the viewer's eye - the unknown

As a painter Lukas Salzmann is committed to representationalism while creating art-historical and media-related references in many of his works. He overpaints photographic templates, thus freeing the images from their functional fixedness. Deploying vehement brushwork and powerful handling, he dissolves content that is seemingly unequivocal and converts it into a polysemy that valorises the mystical as much as it does the obvious. Salzmann’s atmospherically dense pictures open up emotional spaces for viewers, leading them into a state of oscillation between recognisability and recondite unidentifiability, in which the transformative powers of painting can develop their full impact. In the Viewer’s Eyes – the Unknown comprises Lukas Salzmann's oeuvre from 1995 to 2018 and includes an accompanying essay by scholar Rudolf Velhagen, which locates the painter's work in its art historical context.