The paintings in the exhibition exert a special pull. Through deliberately placed axes, staggered image planes, and glazed and opaque areas of color, Jonah Gebka gradually draws the viewer's gaze into the picture. The scenes depict anonymous individuals, sometimes attentively focused on someone else, sometimes completely absorbed in their own thoughts.

Viewers become invisible peripheral figures in the settings, observing private moments over shoulders or looking at brightly lit screens together with the figures. Their atmospheric light models bodies and spaces, while dogs, MacBooks, houseplants, and other everyday objects populate the scenes. The luminous, sometimes gesturally painted contents of the screens contrast with the flatly rendered bodies and interiors. The screens show pristine landscapes, online yoga videos, or fragments of animated films. Windows, doors, bodies, and screens structure the pictorial space, framing the view and layering levels of meaning.

The images in the exhibition all revolve around the domestic space, but aim to dissolve or at least question the supposed warmth, security, and order that it promises.

(Jonah Gebka)

The composition of the works undermines the expectation of seeing “real” life realities here. What at first glance appears to be an intimate everyday scene turns out to be a coded space in which familiarity and strangeness, domestic interiors and stylized visual worlds overlap.