Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art center presents Markus Huemer ‘s second solo exhibition, where the artist showcases the series of works he created during his stay in Ireland. The creation of these paintings is based on image templates that were first composed on site with a photo camera and a computer and then transferred into painting.

At first glance, the motifs of the paintings portray Irish landscapes and Irish plants. At second glance, however, one sees that special plants, special life forms are depicted, namely so-called cryptogams. Cryptogams are life forms that reproduce asexually. Cryptogams are plants that first colonized our planet and have survived every climate change so far and will probably also survive the current climate change unscathed. Cryptogams are true survival artists due to their simple life form. Complex sexual reproduction is much more vulnerable and has always been threatened with extinction. Cryptogams are ferns, mosses, viruses, seaweeds, bacteria, fungi, etc.

The titles of these artworks underline this construction of reality through computer programmes and painting: they are actual existing natural phenomena and yet they do not seem real, but rather bizarre.

As in Huemer’s first exhibition, digital image preparation, which is then transferred into painting, is the artistic and pictorial theme of this exhibition. Not only in the process of creation, but also in terms of content, the correlative relationship between digital image preparation and painting is important: “cryptogames” are not only life forms, but also digital computer games (cryptogames), as the functional logic of both is very similar.