Anne Neukamp — Mirror — Semiose Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 29 days: May 17 → June 21, 2025

Semiose is thrilled to present its first solo exhibition of the German artist Anne Neukamp, which also represents a first step in the collaboration between the artist and the gallery.

This exhibition is centered around a group of works that focus on the mirror. As much an everyday object as a symbol and a concept, the mirror is both an allegory of vision and a marvelous (re)producer of images. Capturing the world around it, the mirror has much in common with the act of painting. In this series however, the artist has chosen to leave its reflective surface blank, replacing it with flat tints in blue and gray, spangled with flashes of light. Whether hand-held, full-length, wall-mounted, oval or rectangular, intact or broken, the mirror is rendered as a pointless object, without reflection of any kind. In this way, through sleight of hand, painting asserts its superiority over this artifact that supposedly reflects an inverted version of truth.

As is usually the case, Anne Neukamp’s representations are brimming with implicit meanings and figurative associations, encouraging us to place our faith in the intelligence of a conceptual approach, without relinquishing either the pleasure of contemplation or humor. In her exhibition entitled Mirror, the artist juggles with various visual conventions from the communications industry, combining clean lines with exaggerated pixelation, deconstructing certain images to the point of rendering them illegible.  As far as the backgrounds are concerned, she maintains her colored, almost monochrome settings, with a few visual imperfections similar to smudges on photocopies, or the scales of old paintings, which render the backgrounds more dynamic and lively. Obliged to reconsider our habitual reading of an image, this series confronts the viewer with the “mirror stage” of painting; we are obliged to recognize its internal logic, including all its conjuring tricks, in order to access its second degree, and in fine its irony.