Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth
„And When I See a Ghost I Really See a Ghost“

Hardly any other medium in art history has been so closely tied to the notion of individual authorship as painting. It is regarded as the paradigmatic form of creative subjectivity – a medium in direct physical connection with the producer: the brushstroke as signature of the body, the surface as psychological resonance space. This entanglement of action, materiality, and authorship is constitutive for the Western idea of the artistic genius.

The exhibition “And When I See a Ghost I Really See a Ghost” questions and decenters this notion. The artists on view do not treat painting as a self-contained object but as a relational field – a processual formation in which subjectivity, materiality, and space become unstable and permeable. Instead of unified authorship, what emerges is a fragmented, shared, at times indeterminate structure of artistic production. The artwork is no longer understood as the manifestation of an autonomous subject, but as an interface between economic, ethical, social, and aesthetic parameters.

The German term and concept of “position” here functions deliberately as a counter-model to the idea of a coherent artist-subject. It marks an attitude within a discursive field without essentializing it biographically or stylistically. The practices involved operate with an expanded form of painting that not only exceeds the boundaries of the canvas but also subverts institutional and medial conventions. The picture plane itself becomes a subject, extending into the exhibition space, while the artwork becomes a site of shared subjectivities.

These strategies do not only negotiate questions of aesthetic form but fundamentally address the status of the artwork in a present where production and reception can no longer be understood as separate, but rather as circular movements. Painting appears here not as an autonomous language but as a fluid structure within which authorship, materiality, and meaning are continually reconfigured.

For KAYA – a collaborative project founded in 2010 by Kerstin Brätsch and Debo Eilers, sometimes joined by the namesake Kaya Serene – painting is negotiated as an unstable, transmedial constellation. This configuration resists the idea of coherent artistic identity, instead developing an “anti-I” in which authorship is not represented but organized as a processual, fluid instance. KAYA does not operate from a subject but as a situational formation in which painting, body, and object enter into unstable relations, whereby the object itself assumes subject-status and is charged with experiences, social encounters, but also with violence. In the work SPREPPER_SCHNAKEN Table #1 (2015) – a dissecting-table-like display with body casts of Kaya and a painting on polyester foil strapped down with tension belts – the painterly gesture is brought into tension with the material presence of the body. The strapping of both painting and body, along with visible markings by coins, point to a radical visualization of capitalization processes: painting functions here not as a site of subjective self-expression, but as a vehicle of economic inscription – just as the body becomes a bearer of value attributions and part of circulating markets. Painting turns into a porous membrane between object, subject, and system.

For Maria VMier, too, painting is not a closed pictorial form but a relational formation – a complex of gesture, surface, texture, and body. Their works on folded paper destabilize the classical conception of the painting as a coherent surface. Instead, they fragment space and picture support into units of attention, dissolving both the centered, authoritative gaze and the idea of a singular artistic expression. Their practice articulates itself as a “companion-system” – a non-hierarchical interweaving of picture support and space, of producer(s) and viewer(s). In their work Das Ende des Kapitalismus [mit LJ Jeschke], VMier reflects on their own role as producer within the tension between artistic appropriation and economic embedding: instead of merely responding with a linguistic reference to the titular quotation from Lisa Jeschke’s text Alien / Care / Wall, VMier proposes a form of participation and visibility. Their painting not only formally resists the product logic of capitalist image production but also subverts its valorization logic – through processes of return, cooperation, and situational presence. The gesture is not erased, but becomes an identitarian part of the work itself.

Ari Pilhofer develops an expanded understanding of painting as an unstable system that unfolds across canvas, body, sculpture, and digital media. Their works operate with queer-coded, hybrid figures – masks, limbs, insect bodies, ritually charged shadow beings – that resist clear representation. Instead of producing a coherent image, Pilhofer creates transitions, blurrings, permeabilities. Often floating in their installation, their paintings appear as bodies – vulnerable, soft, multiple – while also serving as carriers of techno-symbolic transformation. Analog and digital processes intertwine: painted surfaces are scanned, altered, and translated into sculpture, ceramics, or clothing. These processes generate a techno-magical imagery in which symbols, surfaces, and bodies merge. Pilhofer understands softness, repetition, and craft – through sewing, casting, layering – not as ornamental gestures but as political strategies of resistance and recoding. The recurring archetype of the Spider-Knight functions as a fluid vessel of collective practices of protection and refusal. Their works undermine categorical divisions between subject and object, materiality and immateriality, generating a pictorial practice of re-ritualization in which digital and immaterial ghosts merge into tangible artifacts.

The exhibition title refers to the collaborative work Kollega (1993) by Franz West and Herbert Brandl. On the pedestal of the sculpture, they inscribed the sentence: “When I see a ghost, I really see a ghost” – a phrase attributed to the physicist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach. West was known for appropriating and incorporating theoretical discourses, less interested in systematic exegesis than in their subversive-associative reuse. The phrase itself seems emblematic of questioning stable concepts of identity: it negotiates visibility, projection, materiality, and the phantom-like nature of perception. In the context of the exhibition, it serves as a point of reference for an inquiry into painting as a processual, relational practice shaped by shifts in subjectivity.

Ernst Mach, known both as a physicist and as a pioneer of the philosophy of science, here functions – especially with his thesis on the illusion of the self – as a theoretical resonance space. In Mach’s thought, the self is not an ontologically secure instance but a fluctuating aggregate of sensory impressions, memories, and relations. Spirit and matter are not dichotomous entities in this model, but moments of a continuous flow of experience. It is precisely in this destabilization of the subject that the exhibition locates its critical potential: painting is not understood as an expression of individual depth, but as a site of fragmentation, mediality, and the negotation of authorship.