Due to climate change, political unrest, war and migration, we are facing profound changes in our time, which we often experience as overwhelming and confusing. In his latest series of paintings TRANSIT, Dieter Mammel (1965) translates these seemingly uncontrollable forces into a human scale. Mammel himself knows the stories of his grandparents who had to flee across the Balkans to Germany at the end of World War II.
The TRANSIT series can include symbolic images such as a man wading through water, or more explicitly with refugees in a winter landscape or a monkey screeching in anger and helplessness.
In Escape, you see a line of men in a snowy landscape walking towards a tunnel. The image recalls refugees or prisoners of war who have escaped from danger and face an indeterminate future.