Language enables us to see, to feel and at the same time to translate our thoughts into images in a moment of remembrance between present and past. Into associations and meanings that are reflected in the reality of our everyday lives like abstract images of what we have experienced and, like visual signs, convey the meanings of our experiences. As images, they lie between the words - and thus in the shadow of our cultural memory. Here they overlap, enlarge, become paler, in order to ultimately recombine in a flow of constant change in their form-to-form fragments of our perception.

Linn Lühn is particularly pleased to announce Johannes Wohnseifer's fourth solo exhibition, Niagara, which follows a subtractive system of deconstruction and reconstruction centering around the meanings of found images and their linguistic translation. Something that presents itself to us as an excerpt. As a set piece that hides behind the remains of our material legacies and uses language to formulate its own, partly hidden idea of pictorial experiences. They refer to Wohnseifer's drawn word pictures darkly, partly permeable on heavy paper, on which the traces of their creation process, like our thoughts, blur into ever new meanings.
Based on headings within an anonymous fanzine entitled A History In Cuttings by the British band Joy Division (later New Order), Wohnseifer's charcoal drawings simultaneously denote their own materiality. Text fragments such as From safety to where?, TESTING CHARACTERS, Cosmic Overdose or THICK AS THIEVES prove to be copies of upstream reproduction processes, whose reference seems to gradually disappear in the gray of their drawing and turns into images of its own reception. Within it, Wohnseifer's works slowly evolve into a meta-text: Into images that forget themselves, lay tracks and onomatopoeically overdraw themselves in their own layers of quotations of images and language - and whose content is washed out in the constant flow of images of our thoughts, in gaps and empty spaces.

Fragments of text are quietly and fragilely woven into painting and recede behind the surfaces of abstract compositions, in which they almost unrealistically erase themselves with the templates of a 1970s slide archive of nature photographs. In them, the effect of the images in a dialog between language and painting gains the upper hand. Like places of longing for pure nature, the photographs of Niagara Falls are powerfully placed here as still moments of our memory before language, while echoing their cinematic and painterly references. In Niagara Cuttings, it transforms symbiotically into something new. A new order of linguistic and pictorial hierarchies in form of a previously imaginary publication layout in a state “before publication”, in which Wohnseifer's pictures once again speak of what lies between the words: Of everyday life, which painterly inscribes itself with its present in images of distorted DHL lettering. Of the past, which in excerpts of musical references and cinematic images - against its erasure - writes itself anew into the present. And of the attempt to capture a world of images by means of a language whose fluctuating nature is only revealed in the quoting hide-and-seek game of a copy.