Long Way Home

How do you look at familiar images and memories when many years have passed? And how do they shape a gaze upon the real world, here and now?

In his current paintings and prints, Leon Friederichs explores landscapes and spaces from childhood. The excerpts burnt into his memory coalesce to a whole in the paintings. An overlapping of years and seasons; layers communicating more than the components of a moment. It is also this simultaneity of movement that Friederichs repeatedly captures in landscapes and buildings, whether through the depiction of light, wind, clouds and shadows or through the dynamics of the objects themselves.

Far removed from home and yet turned towards it, in constant dialogue about how to depict it, how to take the patriarchal and social structures with them, without exclusively reproducing them, but rather transferring them in the process of observation. Friederichs searches for ways to open up representation. Is it possible to let go, to look back without inscribing the present?

Text: Michèle Yves Pauty