Artists

Fabian Treiber, Michael Günzer

Press release

Fabian Treiber (b. 1986, lives and works in Stuttgart, DE) and Michael Günzer (b. 1982, lives and works in Ulm, DE) present their first duo exhibition Im Gerinne with Ruttkowski;68 in Düsseldorf. The exhibition brings together two painters connected less by a shared subject than by a common interest in the conditions under which images acquire meaning. Both work from existing visual worlds – Günzer from photographs and stagings circulating through media, politics, popular culture, and social networks; Treiber from remembered images, everyday spaces, and collective visual memory. Rather than reproducing these sources, both understand painting as a way of testing, transforming, and ultimately rethinking the images from which they begin. While Günzer examines the performative mechanisms of power by placing public figures in absurd, fragile, or aggressive constellations, Treiber explores the instability of perception. His spaces are structured less by linear perspective than by the logic of visual memory. The title Im Gerinne refers to the street where Michael Günzer lives, a place that has quietly become part of the artists’ shared history. The word itself suggests both a location and a process – something shaped through repeated movement rather than fixed definition. In much the same way, the paintings in the exhibition emerge through the reworking of images that already have histories of their own. If Treiber paints the stages, settings, and spaces left open to projection, Günzer populates them with figures whose presence exposes the absurdities and tensions embedded in contemporary image culture. Together, their works exist in constant conversation, unsettling and reshaping the very images from which they take their point of departure.