The exhibition “Art is dead – Gabora has killed it” picks up on precisely this spirit. Gabora declares the pleasing, harmless art of the present dead – and at the same time creates its radical rebirth. His painting is an attack, a confession and an outburst all in one. Formally, Gabora moves in the tradition of the new figuration, but his pictures refuse any clarity. His figures are decomposed, exaggerated, grotesquely exaggerated. Lines of influence to Lüpertz, Baselitz or Francis Bacon are recognizable, as are traces of Dadaism – but everything is broken by a radically subjective, obsessive handwriting. Gabora does not paint the real, but the too much of the real: bodies and emotions come under pressure, derail, tip over into the grotesque. His imagery combines humor and cynicism, eroticism and menace. “Pling, Pling Superding”, one of his provocative titles, is not a joke, but a manifesto: a rejection of moral harmlessness, of decorative arbitrariness. Instead: The courage to be embarrassing, the pleasure of contradiction, tenderness through deformation. Philosophical references – Nietzsche as a spark in the fire – are not a goal for Gabora, but a starting point. He is not looking for explanations, but for explosions. His art is both a laboratory and a borderline experience: it tests how much intensity a picture can still carry today. “Live art – don’t explain it” is his credo. Conny Gabora creates works that challenge, disturb, but also seduce the viewer. With this exhibition, he questions art itself – and in the same breath proves its unbroken vitality.

Janina Bruegel takes figurative painting into a new, painfully honest present. Her works are visual dissecting laboratories of the human – radically intimate, brutally tender, unashamedly alive. She does not paint people, she “devours” them, absorbs their essence and exposes it again in 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.

Bruegel’s paintings are a precise psychogram of our time. The new Biedermeier that she makes visible is by no means just an escape or superficiality. It is also a place of relaxation, of consolation, a counter-space in which the everyday gives strength and the decorative becomes a shelter. Behind the floral patterns, cake plates, sun loungers and living room idylls, loneliness and alienation shimmer as well as the deep, human longing for stability, warmth and belonging. Her painting is not a judgment, but a mirror – a precise one that allows for tenderness as well as ruthlessness.

Artistically, Bruegel draws on the New Objectivity and the psychological depth of Lucian Freud, but unswervingly pursues her own path. Her protagonists are tangible, vulnerable, full of dignity and contradiction. Life stories are condensed in her color spaces; bodies become archives, wallpapers become sound spaces of memory.

YOUMANE is therefore more than just an exhibition title – it is a statement. An artificial word that spells out the human in a new way. It refers to the fragility and dignity of existence, to our fear of closeness and our desire for it. Bruegel shows what we overlook in everyday life: the true, unfiltered humanity between coffee, cakes, views – and the soul.