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Double eye trouble, a double solo exhibition by Katharina Maderthaner and Jochen Mühlenbrink, opens RizzutoGallery's autumn exhibition season.

Katharina Maderthaner, sculptor from Düsseldorf who has been among the artists represented by the Gallery since 2016, and Jochen Mühlenbrink, internationally renowned painter living between Germany and the Netherlands, who will open his first solo exhibition in Italy on this occasion. What unites the two artists is their working on the ambiguity of reality that creates a tension between perception and expectation, disrupting the notion of objectivity.

Katharina Maderthaner’s (Meerbusch, Germany, 1982) artworks draw inspiration from bizarre everyday situations in which the false mimics the real and the copy attempts to supplant the original, oscillating between good taste and bad.

This focus triggers a need in the artist to rework her experiences through an act of synthesis and sublimation, ultimately leading to the creation of something absolutely new. Banality mirrors solemnity, the duplicate mirrors the unique article, the fake and the imitation mirror the authentic in a conflation of quotidian pastiche and hidden genius, of the masterpiece and the mass-produced, of design and disaster. The artist passes between these opposed worlds by transforming one into the other and smearing their boundaries. Maderthaner’s works thus arouse an uneasy déjà-vu in their viewer, recalling things seemingly familiar; in her installations, her images and her objects, references appear that point in turn to other references. Long genealogies of taste unfold before the observer of her art, akin to a symbolic current that draws forth objects, images, ideas and motifs, leaving a rich, heterogeneous and bizarre resonance.

Katharina Maderthaner draws inspiration from bizarre everyday situations in which the fake mimics the real and the copy attempts to supplant the original, oscillating between good taste and bad; in her artworks the artist passes between these opposed worlds by transforming one into the other and smearing their boundaries.

Jochen Mühlenbrink (Germany, 1980) is best known for his "trompe l'oeil" paintings made through a painting technique that "tricks the eye," inducing in the viewer the illusion of reality. His hyperrealistic works describe his philosophical approach to painting, where themes of perspective, imagination, escapism and secrecy converge. Mühlenbrink investigates the ambiguity of reality through the execution of natural optical effects in painting. His misted glass panes with figures and illustrations seemingly drawn from condensation, for example, are actually paintings and exist as much for the illusion they produce as for the material they are made of. The misty glasses, with their pristine surfaces disturbed by fingerprints, immediately become images within images and demonstrate what can be seen through them. Looking at these works by Mühlenbrink, one is reminded of the innocence and inventiveness of childhood when, sitting in the back of a car, one would trace drawings on fogged windows with one's fingers. In this way the artist offers a glimpse of what lies beyond the fog, and the colorful suburban houses give his paintings two areas of focus. In other works the artist paints windows as if they were obscured by tape, at other times in his oil paintings he reproduces scribbled sheets, postcards, Polaroid photos hung on a wall with portions of colored tape, all illusions produced by painting that subverts the preconceived idea of reality.