With *YOUMANE – A HUMAN PERSPECTIVE*, Janina Brügel brings figurative painting into a new, painfully honest present. Her works are visual dissection labs of the human condition—radically intimate, brutally tender, outrageously alive. She does not paint people; she “devours” them, absorbs their essence, and reveals it anew through layers of paint. The result: bodies that tell more than faces ever could; gazes that are simultaneously empty and overflowing; moments that seem like found snapshots and yet are existentially charged.

Artistically, Brügel draws on New Objectivity and the psychological depth of focus characteristic of Lucian Freud, yet she steadfastly follows her own path. Janina Brügel’s paintings are precise psychological portraits of our time.

At the center of the exhibition, a walk-in poetry slam cube adds another layer to this universe. A square steel frame, wrapped in white DIN A4 sheets bearing text fragments, forms a quiet resonant space between image, word, and voice. Inside, poetry slams—texts written by Janina Brügel herself—become visible and audible on a monitor.

YOUMANE is more than just the title of an exhibition—it is a statement. A made-up word that redefines what it means to be human. It refers to the fragility and dignity of existence, to our fear of intimacy and our longing for it.