Born in 1979, Sarah Szczensy studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she was a master’s student under Prof. Rosemarie Trockel in 2009. She currently lives and works in Cologne.

Szczensy’s collage, painting, and video works are put together by disassembling, distorting, and isolating image material like, for example, cartoon film elements. By stretching the boundaries of the various media in which she works, she explores the existential conditions of painting through experimental interventions – using gif and loop techniques, for example, or sound effects. The result is a multidimensionality that gives her paintings a sense of movement and situates them in the cartoon tradition. The process of animating collages, so essential to her work, allows her to bring together formal studies and references from both pop culture history and art history.

Fischer’s works focus on the study, investigation, and re-evaluation of a general art history—especially of classical mythological and historical paintings and scenes. The painter attempts to find a new approach to this subject by consciously deconstructing the art of old masters such as Albrecht Dürer and Peter Paul Rubens. The renewed composition of the painting in and of itself—its tradition and transmission to subsequent generations—unfurls a new connotative freedom. This diversification in Fischer’s paintings allows re-observation of artworks’ fixed statements and traditional historiography. At the levels of appearance and interpretation, this permits the viewer an independent understanding gained via unconstrained appraisal. Fischer’s artistic practice treats drawing and painting equally, thereby critiquing traditional hierarchies of art history.
By playing through and exaggerating various modes of museum exhibition—for example in the form of tinted walls, homemade frames, and museum benches—Fischer expands his interrogation of art history methods to include institutional critique and simultaneously provides a commentary on artistic perfectionism.

Conny Maier explores fundamental questions about human nature, ecology, dominance, and control. The off-kilter figuration in Maier’s paintings, coupled with the inter-species entanglements that her work depicts, articulate precarity and vulnerability as elemental states of being. Her painterly reflections on polarities like dominance and submission, equilibrium and instability, the human and the non-human take an unflinching look at the final throes of the Anthropocene, asking not only what should come to an end but what kind of new day might dawn.

Conny Maier lives and works in Berlin and Baleal, Portugal. She was selected as one of the three recipients of Deutsche Bank’s prestigious Artists of the Year Prize in 2021. Her recent expansive solo exhibition Beautiful Disasters was curated by Udo Kittelmann at the Langen Foundation. Her first monograph was published on the occasion of this show. Her work has recently been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Art Basel Unlimited 2023, Basel; De 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg; Palais Populaire, Berlin; MUDEC, Milan; and at Museum Frieder Burda, Baden Baden.

Dennis Buck (b. 1989, Ulm) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. From 2013–2016 he studied fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin). On completing his studies, Buck was nominated for the "Meisterschüler" program, an honour only awarded to selected students with outstanding artistic achievement.

Located on Leipziger Straße, Dennis Bucks’ studio window reads a note saying “Dennis Buck hates to paint”. The German artist doesn’t take himself too seriously, creating art that is both playful and critical. With his paintings, Buck bags or brand collaborations, Dennis Buck moves across different creative fields, challenging ideas of self-expression with a wink.

Michael Günzer lives and works in Wullenstetten, a district of Senden. He studied at the fine arts in Karlsruhe. From 2010 to 2011 he was a master student of John Bock.
Michael Günzer paints exclusively figurative. In his oil paintings on canvas or paper he portrays people – personalities from art, literature, politics and pop culture as well as people from his immediate environment. Even complete strangers arouse his interest. As models, he uses photographic self-portraits that are publicly available on the World Wide Web and in social networks.

Günzer paints almost manically in series. Variants of the appearance of a single person, produced by a quick hand, increasingly detach the painterly likeness from the carefully staged photographic self-portrayal of the models.