Titus Schade’s (*1984) painted imagery often depicts arrangements reminiscent of theatre stages or film sets. Using the painting “Der Kiosk” (2012) as a basis, in close co-operation with Marialena Lapata he created a stage set for Schauspiel Leipzig for Elfriede Jelinek’s “Wolken.Heim” (directed by Enrico Lübbe, premiere in November 2017). The “Plateau” exhibition at the MdbK combines the stage set - which visitors can walk through - with a selection of works on canvas by the Leipzig-based painter, depicting stage set-like sceneries and pictorial spaces.

In his work Titus Schade, a graduate of the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and master student of Neo Rauch, addresses image and pictorial space. In scenarios reminiscent of stage sets he develops venues that alternate between model and stage situations. In the process, he imagines a broad spectrum of different architecture and props, inviting the observer into a private cosmos on the canvas. Titus Schade does not deal with reality in his works, instead focusing in its counterfeits, reordering them into a self-contained world. In this, the mostly architectural forms and structures are subjected to a Baroque style of lighting. In Schade’s work classic landscape pictures meet geometric shapes, universally legible in their timelessness.

In 1988 “Wolken.Heim” marked the breakthrough for Elfriede Jelinek as a playwright. The play is a collage of questions of identity, a simultaneity of various eras and ways of thinking. It is not only the content of the text that is a collage, but also the way it is crafted. Elfriede Jelinek compiles texts from Hölderlin to Heidegger, from Fichte to the Red Army Faction. In November 2017 the staging of “Wolken.Heim” marked the opening of the newly-built “Diskothek” venue of Schauspiel Leipzig. With this, following on from “Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)” and “Die Schutzflehenden / Die Schutzbefohlenen”, director Enrico Lübbe continues his focus on the Nobel prize winner and most significant German-language dramatist of the present era.