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 Next Generation, Dieter Mammel has depicted a boy with a burden on his back, probably collected waste for which he can still get a little money. The poignant image still has something hopeful at the same time, the boy moves upwards and has alert eyes, as if determined to work his way up out of his hard existence.