›Rooted‹ 30/05/2020—11/07/2020

When you look at the picture by Munich artist Jan Davidoff that gives the exhibition ›Rooted‹ its title, you almost automatically think of the sentence (wrongly) attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the roots and wings that a person needs in order to be able to lead a happy life. The tree, from whose roots the viewer is guided upwards in perspective, resembles a connection between heaven and earth. Its branches, which grow delicately upwards and to the side, merge with the surrounding treetop. The viewer's gaze is guided by a multitude of clues that lead the eye to unexpected places. Coordinates in the form of highlights and dots, small holes and cracks through which the light shines, strands of lines and branches allow abstraction and figuration to merge into one another. This is mainly due to the painter's technique, which plays with this dichotomy by depicting realities only at first glance, but which are quickly overlaid by many subjective layers. Jan Davidoff's works, which are mostly based on photographs, are created using different techniques, with paints, stains, varnishes on different substrates, such as canvas or brass plates, whereby the depicted is alienated in many different ways. The structures created in the viewer's mind in this way are dissolved and regrouped with each glance, thus repeatedly referring to the painter's major theme: nature and the traces that humans leave in it. The fact that humans appear less as individuals here, but rather as communal beings in their actions, is expressed above all in the works with crowds of people. Here, too, it quickly becomes clear that the individual appears in ever new constellations - in one moment he is in the foreground through the play of colors, in the next he appears long since overlaid by others or even dissolves completely in the interplay of abstract forms. Depictions of nature and people are often at the centre of Davidoff's work, but they are by no means contradictory, but rather part of a whole. Nature, which in the 21st century exists almost exclusively as a cultural landscape, shaped and tamed by humans, shows through its man-made contradictions what fascinates Jan Davidoff again and again in his work. Not least, this fascination gives rise to the analogy to human existence, as shown in ›Rooted‹.