With J’M donc je suis, Düsseldorf-based painter Jochen Mühlenbrink (b. 1980) takes stock of the productive years 2018 to 2023, during which he further developed and sublimated his theme, the ambiguity of the correspondence between visual perception and depictive reality. With the Window Paintings, for example, he takes up a very own and old motif of painting, the image detail as a view and window into the world: in Mühlenbrink’s work, it is seemingly almost rendered impossible from the outset. Streaks of condensation form the foreground of a hyper-realistic everyday scene in a veiled background, visible only through tiny sections of “painted-out” fi ngerprints in the window. The process of cognition triggered by this strategy of showing and concealing brings two factual realities before the viewer’s eyes, that of the picture and that in the picture, and puts them to a sophisticated test in this double respect: Je vois donc je suis? With a knowledgeable and exciting essay by the art historian Anna Heinze, further text contributions by Saša Bogojev and Sebastian Schmitt. High-quality design, brilliant printing and climate-neutral production. Jochen Mühlenbrink, *1980 in Freiburg (DE), lives and works in Düsseldorf (DE).weiterlesen