what lies behind it

The exhibition "What Lies Behind" invites visitors to look more closely and beyond their first impressions. The exhibited works by the four artists Meike Lohmann, Jochen Pankrath, Gerhard Rießbeck and Ute Wältring ostensibly show paintings that revolve around people and their immediate surroundings – landscapes, urban spaces, architecture. At the same time, they revolve around themes such as dreams, memories, imagination and fantasy. All four artistic positions deal with these themes in the tension between realistic implementation and surreal or abstract image forms. The artworks in the exhibition are multi-layered – both in terms of content and painting style. The underlying image content is always hinted at in a painterly way. Gerhard Rießbeck's paintings appear realistic at first glance, but play with surreal moments in various ways, while Jochen Pankrath incorporates abstract elements into his realistically rendered spaces and figures, which take on meaning on a content level. Meike Lohmann locates her clearly designed figures and architectures in pictorial spaces abstracted by painting technique and additional embroidery, so that they appear in a completely different way and yet similarly fleeting as the figures of Ute Wältring, in whose abstract paintings the motifs sometimes seem to be hinted at, sometimes to condense precisely. In engaging with the paintings and what is depicted in them, visitors can, on the one hand, recognise the meaning intended by the artists. Above all, however, they can also trace their own dreams, ideas and inner images in them.

Last edited on 11.03.2026