Paul Glaw: Pleasure Anorexia                  
6 November—23 December 2021            

We are pleased to announce the solo exhibition Pleasure Anorexia by Paul Glaw.
After Glaw's first works were shown in the group exhibition November Series Pt. 2 in November 2020, the artist now presents his first solo exhibition at Josef Filipp Galerie. In the media of painting, sculpture and digitally generated videos, Paul Glaw once again addresses the Wende years in East Germany and tells of the experiences, concerns and ambivalence in the perception and narration of reunification and its consequences.

In his chromatically coded works in orange and blue, Paul Glaw stages scenes and moments of everyday life that he describes as symptomatic of his experiences of the 1990s and early 2000s in Halle/Saale since German reunification. With a critical attitude towards prevailing narratives, Paul Glaw thereby tells of people's experiences during this time; he speaks of worries, fears, the loss of social institutions, violence, lethargy and the lack of perspectives.

The use of ambivalence is central to his visual language and narrative strategy. Developing his own iconography and distinctive style in a colour code of blue and orange tones that is metaphorical in itself, Paul Glaw addresses issues of identity and change that are intimately connected to the heard and unheard stories of reunification and East Germany. »Despite growing up in the FRG, I realise that I live in two worlds because of my East German origins. That of the FRG and that of East Germany,« he says. His art is a plea for an open perception of two social realities as well as different historical narratives in Germany from the 1990s to today. In the sense of a greater awareness of diversity, however, he repeatedly emphasises that his examination of processes of exclusion and inclusion within societies, his questions about the nature and meaning of identity, but also identity problems, are not limited to his specific narrative context of East Germany since the 1990s.

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