Longer, Brighter Days

In her solo exhibition, Maria Kozak explores hope and resilience in challenging times.

Longer, brighter days - at first, this sounds like a simple promise: more light, more lightness, more zest for life. The English equivalent, Longer, Brighter Days, is the title of this promising exhibition by Maria Kozak. In fact, the title evokes the familiar spring formula that is repeated year after year: The first rays of sunshine cause plants to blossom and wildlife to come to life. The warmth of the light pervades our every pore and lures us out into the open air. This awakening, this breathing of fresh air after a cold and often gloomy winter torpor, this long-awaited glimmer of hope seems like a new start for the soul.

But we all know that where there is a lot of light, there is always a lot of shadow. And as we all know, it is precisely on the threshold between day and night that the most dreamlike illusions are created. (...)

Her works, in which the colors and forms blur almost psychedelically into one another and hints of contours are stronger than detailed formulations, unfold a peculiar attractiveness with simultaneous ambivalence. They immediately draw the viewer into a maelstrom, as if another, deeper level of reality is opening up behind the smooth surface of the picture. Silhouettes of figures and situations appear familiar and at the same time distant, like fragments of memory that can never be fully grasped or captured. (...)

In contrast to the prophecy in the exhibition title, Maria Kozak's pictures on display are thus anything but merely cheerful mood pictures that are more or less muted in their choice of colors. They are pictorial (re)discoveries of transition - images of emotional weather conditions. And that is precisely why they touch us so deeply: because they do not seek the human in the unambiguous, but in the contradiction, that is, where light and shadow exist simultaneously.

Perhaps it is precisely in this realization that a future-oriented reading lies, which is reflected in the works of Maria Kozak: never be too sure, remain open, always start anew, sound out traditional boundaries, even if this means having to jump over one's own shadow. The quintessence of this alchemy of change(ing) is the art of living - and loving - in an "enlightened" sense.

By Corinna Steimel

Events
Vernissage (brunch with the artist)
Saturday, April 18, 2026, 11:00 - 13:00
The artist will be present | RSVP