Works from the Willy Michel Collection. Paintings

freshly painted is the second part of the Willy Michel collection devoted entirely to contemporary painting with traditional motifs such as landscapes, portraits and objects.

The exhibition presents artists who show their «true colours» - from the garish red tones of a Swiss knife to colourful mosaics and portraits, the colour fades in the landscape pictures to a restricted chromatic chalky palette and what remains are indistinct images in colourless spaces.

Landscapes by Ottersbach, Sasnal, Adach, Drühl and Reist appear pallid, washed out and matt and reveal what is not shown. Memories – media images. The past is conserved in films and photographs in the image archive of the artist and the images worked over as «paradigms». From this, pictures of «exploited» history emerge.

Pictures as objects and objects as pictures. Both fuse in the case of Tatjana Doll and Cornelius Völker. Everyday motifs, be they a Swiss knife, a bank statement or a

towel, in tenfold magnification they lose their reference to reality while gaining a new aspect. The paintings develop into «icons» – societal and cultural «symbols» that are not neutral in their values but can be understood by everyone.

One room has been given over solely to Markus Vater’s portraits; displayed in all their forceful size, colour and conceptual ideas. Jack Nicholson does not just conquer the cinema screen. As a visitor in close-up, he is shown here in his true «guise» – as a superstar of the screen, the canvas. In addition to Vater’s «ingenious comic figures» and his critical self-portrait, there is the striking «high carat» pencil portrait of a woman – striking not only due to its size but also due its lack of colour.

Contemporary art does not only «return to the figure» as in 2006-07 at the museum franz gertsch, but now also seeks the figure, in addition to the portraits, in landscape painting of the 21st century, in pictures that do not allow dripping, the impasto technique, projection or serigraphy – but that are simply freshly painted.