In her new body of work, Melanie Siegel continues to explore the encounter between human and nature. While the human figure is absent from these images, his perception is reflected through the depictions of the landscape. Her paintings portray places situated at the intersection of the strange and the familiar; landscape, architecture, imagination, and faint memories coalesce into a new reality. The starting point is often an actual place, yet through a prolonged process of drawing and painting, it undergoes a transformation from a specific site into a state of consciousness. The swimming pools, forests, gardens, windows, and architectural spaces, all seemingly familiar places, refuse to settle into a definitive identity. The water reflections, the interplay of light and shadow, and the geometric structures are not merely a depiction of landscape; they reflect the internal state of the viewer.
Silence is very present in Siegel’s work. It is a charged and active silence, inviting the viewer to slow down their gaze, shifting from a fleeting glance to a contemplative look. The absence of human figures clears a path for the presence of light, water, and space. As the gaze prolongs, the distinctions between interior and exterior, nature and culture, reality and imagination begin to blur. The painting ceases to be a window to the world and becomes a space where the world itself is reconstructed. Every shift in perspective opens a new possibility for understanding the place, and each subsequent glance changes the picture entirely.
The exhibition engages in a dialogue with Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924), not as a literary illustration, but as a conceptual departure point. The novel is set in an isolated sanatorium in the Alps, which Mann chose as the backdrop for a story dealing with the decline of Europe right before World War I. In his book, Mann describes the place as alienated and isolated, a space where the waters remained still and foreign, as if belonging to another realm. A place where the air was so clear, so transparent, so stripped of all earthly weight, that it felt almost impossible to breathe. Siegel revisits these descriptions against the backdrop of contemporary reality. Much like the world depicted in the novel, here too time slows down, the everyday is stripped of the self-evident, and reality is re-examined through the act of observation. Painting becomes a space where the act of seeing itself is the subject.
In an age of hurried attention spans, Siegel offers painting as a site of lingering. Her works invite the viewer to slow down, to remain before the image, and to allow it to transform as the gaze unfolds. In this sense, every perspective indeed becomes a new window.
Melanie Siegel (b. 1978, Germany) is a painter living and working in Munich. After training as a scenic painter, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, under Karin Kneffel, graduating in 2015 as her master student (Meisterschülerin). Siegel has received numerous awards and grants from leading cultural institutions in Germany, including the Sparkasse Karlsruhe Cultural Foundation and the Erwin and Gisela von Steiner Foundation. Her work has been exhibited in prominent museums and art spaces, including the Rathausgalerie München and Museum Kunsthaus Fürstenfeldbruck, as well as Art Basel Miami, the Pinakothek Munich, among others.
