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.
In Time Travel, a naked man stands in the water, hands on hips, head tilted to the side. He seems lost in contemplation as if looking back in time, the wide black outline around him reinforcing this sense of introspection. The painting is based on a photograph of Anselm Kiefer.