heroes role models idols

The first exhibition in the series AND WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN? has dealt with heroes and anti-heroes, with international pop stars, their followers and people who enable and promote their star cult. Striving for social role models has been critically examined at different levels.

Simon Menner's series 30 Jesuses shows 29 men and one woman who either claim to be a reincarnation of Jesus or whose disciples believe so. The sequence of the 30 portraits takes their idea ad absurdum. By presenting the found photographs against a golden background, they appear like early icon paintings. The dark side of our hero worship leads. Manu Washaus in the work Time Square in mind: he photographed the people behind the American heroes, those who enable and maintain our international star cult. In this way he shows the discrepancy between what they are and what they represent. Another work by the young artist, the minimalist sound work I am the one, is reminiscent of a pop song and touches on the existence of idol figures on several levels. The song comes from one of the biggest pop stars and is about idols. At the same time, the sound work, whose reference remains recognizable despite its abstraction, makes it clear how strong our common pop culture imprint is. The constructed and medially conveyed images of heroes. Thorsten Passfeld confronts a woman in an everyday action. With a bent posture and without paying attention to her surroundings, she checks her leaf rake. She is not portrayed as a classic heroine - without being an anti-heroine. The wooden relief created for this exhibition bears the programmatic title Normal Man. Egle Otto examines our hero production and construction at a higher level and questions the influences of society, media and mentors. How is the cowboy's hero status actually justified in the 1990s? What is behind the myth of this male sex symbol that was helped to shape the Malboro ad? The three-part work Götze shows sections of the protagonist of different sizes, which sometimes appear as a cowboy saluting alive, sometimes as a frozen equestrian statue that is at the mercy of the environment. The paintings thus also reflect the manipulable effect of images. The work Botticelli, Giotto, Grünewald, da Vinci, Dürer, Mantegna, Rossetti, Ensor, Parmigianino, Lippi, Raffael, van der Weyden, Ingres, Ernst is a homage by the artist to her own artistic role models. In the work I thank all of you, these male painters are juxtaposed with a list of female protagonists. Dealing with role models and heroes seems hardly possible today without including gender issues. Julie Gufler combines text, image, sculpture and the performative act in her 'living sculptures', as she calls some of her works. In Skirting the Edges of the Familiar she deals with her own biographies and those of the artists involved in the exhibition. This creates another level of reflection, which also becomes thematic in Egle Otto's works in a different way - about the current role and status of artists in our society.

The exhibition was shown in February 2014 in the Elektrohaus Hamburg.