Márton Nemes, Jonny Niesche and Anselm Reyle

“Quality, light, colour, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind

Colours, some electric with blazing ferocity, others absorbing the viewer in total tenderness, welcome the body into the space. The practices of Jonny Niesche (b. 1972, Sydney, Australia), Anselm Reyle (b. 1970, Tübingen, Germany), and Márton Nemes (b. 1986, Székesfehérvár, Hungary) converge in a shared fascination with colour, surface, materiality, and embodied presence. Lebenswelt unfolds as a microcosm of its own: colour fields permeate rounded walls, suspended neon tubes punctuate space, and coloured lights refract from mirrored bars. Drawing on the inherited languages of postwar abstraction, impressions of popular culture, and the music scenes they gravitate towards, their worlds coalesce here as variations on a theme. Painting expands far beyond the picture plane, echoing not only in space, but in our bodies.

Lebenswelt, literally lifeworld, denotes the everyday world as it is lived and implicitly understood. It is the realm of the taken-for-granted—bodily automatisms, memories, assumptions, expectations, social conventions, and acquired cultural knowledge; things that ordinarily escape our attention and scrutiny. A term adopted from phenomenology, Lebenswelt, operates here as a touchstone for encounters with the artworks, individually and collectively. Focus is directed thus towards the often-neglected perceptive encounter, preceding—but never detaching from—the facts, references, histories, and theorisations through which the artworks become legible.

Sleek mirror edges frame pulsating, hypnotic rings of colour in Jonny Niesche’s perfectly square composition: a deep crimson nucleus, encircled by an arena of acid pink and pale lilac, draws the gaze inwards—an almost gravitational pull. The colour field is nebulous, while the physical object remains extraordinarily crisp. Niesche treats colour as both a material and a perceptual event. Cosmetic sheen and glam-rock aesthetics mingle with echoes of Minimalism, Op Art, and Colour Field painting.

At a distance, the narrowing concentricity in Geiger counter for Rupprecht (2026) or Binary Mystic (diptych) (2026) produces an almost anatomical sense of interiority. Colour performs itself. It confronts the viewer with an irresistible magnetism, in which saturation and spatiality together evoke an intense bodily response—much like a deep inhalation that expands the lungs to their fullest capacity. Close up, layers of dye-sublimated voile blend tones softly in spatial rather than purely optical terms, producing a moiré effect that destabilises vision and focus. Beyond illusion, Niesche’s image-objects have actual depth, a body; their mirrored edges invite the viewer to move, see and be seen, unsettling the distinction between object and subject.

Cosmic division (Markers of intimacy) (2026) extends this dynamic further into space. Mirrors along the peripheral sides of coloured bars simultaneously distance and embed the viewer, creating a sense of intimacy. The mirror-polished steel framesof Nemes’s Silence Paintings operate similarly. For Reyle, however, reflection is more tacit. In his Stripe Paintings, vertical bands collide, each held in tension with the next—assertive pink pops against the glowing golden band of creased mirror foil; three shades of lavish purple are interrupted by a drop of bright neon orange. Reflection becomes a latent pigment, with only a holographic shadow signalling the viewer’s presence in the golden band. In Untitled (2025), Reyle troubles material certainty with isolated, synthetic chrome brushstrokes—appearing freshly painted—analytically layered over crude burlap. Reyle decontextualises the expressive brushstroke and turns it into simulation, ultimately revealing the underlying ambiguity in the familiar.

Whereas Niesche draws the viewer inwards through an ethereal vocabulary, Anselm Reyle anchors the body through substantial materiality—reinforcing its sense of balance and groundedness. A fluorescent neon configuration hangs on chains; luminous lines converge and diverge like expressive strokes drawn in space. Amidst them, a tilted red heart and the word love become legible. Chains suggest dependence, oblique neon tubes lability, and electricity a conditional source of power. Borrowing materials from domestic, consumer, urban, and industrial environments, Reyle uses the logic of commercial signage to proclaim the most human of experiences: love—universally understood, yet resistant to a single definition. Or is it simply a playful take on an enduring tacky cliché? High art and kitsch collide.

Readily decipherable signs recur in Untitled (2023), where neon lines appear against crumpled metallic foil alongside the inscription club. Enclosed behind tinted acrylic glass evocative of a confined nightclub, the glowing work recalls the bodily intensity of nightlife, pulsating with light and rhythm as crowds breathe almost in unison. Escapism and isolation come into play. 

With a deep engagement in techno and rave culture, Márton Nemes’s art generates energy like bodies on the dancefloor—synchronised, ecstatic, heaving. In Synchronicity Paintings, pungent gestural slashes partially conceal a chasm and LED panels animating shifting colours and fragmented shapes. Gesture is arrested in solid matter, only to be set back in motion through animation. Artificial light floods outwards, reversing Niesche’s corporeal inward pull. As painting is given an algorithmic dimension, Nemes points to the digital habits and screen-mediated behaviours naturalised in contemporary life. Amidst this technological excess, where physical and digital structures coexist, a serene desire to grow silent emerges.

Soft oblongs of vibrant pink and deep orange-red diffuse across Silence Paintings 15 (2026), their airbrushed transitions appearing weightless and atmospheric. Metal brackets wrap around the painting without fully enclosing it, while the two descending oval fields overlap along the central axis. Their fading contours recall a pair of lungs. Nemes’s colour fields align with Lee Ufan’s proposition of painting as exhalation, turning invisible bodily reflex into visible trace. Silence Paintings dwell at the threshold between holding a breath before fully letting go—pressure followed by complete release. The gap in the frame materialises this outward flow, or externalisation: neither absence, nor completion, but an opening where energy is released outwards. Fierce acrylic shades and polished steel oscillate between confinement and openness, visibility and invisibility. Reaching from techno towards spirituality, Nemes makes movement—of light, image, air, and body—integral to painting.

Niesche’s colour field draws inwards, Reyle’s glowing materials electrify and ground, while Nemes’s painting releases energy outwards. In the lifeworld created by these three artists, the taken-for-granted becomes perceptible. Lebenswelt asks us to notice what thought so easily passes over: the body that looks, moves, remembers, and breathes—through which the artwork comes to life.

– Hanna Claris