‘Fresh from the Aquarius source of inspiration in the truest sense of the word.’

With these words, Anys Reimann describes the starting point of her new exhibition Dawn of Aquarius – a journey through inner and outer worlds of images, through longing, memory and transformation.

Reimann works with collage, painting and sculpture, often simultaneously, in layers, in hints, with superimpositions. Her pictures sometimes emerge intuitively and emotionally, sometimes from a concrete cultural-historical or pop-cultural motif – but often also from a free, associative process in which feelings and thoughts are expressed physically. The results are multi-layered pictorial figures – idiosyncratic, beautiful, vulnerable, ironic or melancholic creatures reminiscent of fairy-tale characters, archetypes, dreams. Or of ourselves.

The exhibition title picks up on a spiritual-astrological concept: the so-called Age of Aquarius. In Astrosophy, it is seen as the beginning of a new, collective phase in which old relationships of violence, authoritarian systems and alienation are overcome. Instead, a togetherness is to emerge – a new consciousness: from ‘I to We’. Harmony, transformation, mutual trust. Perhaps that sounds trusting. Perhaps that is precisely why it is so powerful.

Reimann remembers the beginning of Milos Forman’s film Hair (1979) – the song Aquarius, which left her with a
lasting feeling of hope, freedom and community. A promise. A departure. She quotes:

„…Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!“

Just as the song creates a utopian image of the world, Reimann’s works also tell of possible futures – not loudly, not boldly, but through allusions, questions and connections. Works such as The Fool (on the hill), A Midsummernight’s Dream or Melt (weeping men) cannot be clearly categorised. They oscillate between seriousness and irony, between tribute and reconsideration. Some seem like dream sequences, others like snatched scenes from history, viewed through the filter of the now.

In the exhibition, we encounter the Queen of the Night (sitting in the backseat of my Cadillac) – a figure between opera and street, between glamour and everyday life. And the work Mae (Homage to Richter) makes no secret of her artistic engagement with role models, with history, with painting itself.

Behind all this lies a genuine interest in people – in our feelings, contradictions, masks, injuries and possibilities. Reimann looks closely. And she looks further. ‘Hommages, melancholy, irony and hope … seeing new, different and further,’ she says herself.

Perhaps the Age of Aquarius does not begin on a specific date. Perhaps it begins within us – with an idea, an
image, an encounter.