From 14th February until 15th March 2025, Galerie Martin Janda is showing the group exhibition Echoes with works by Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, Adriana Czernin, Werner Feiersinger, Nilbar Güreş, Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Mangelos, Asier Mendizabal, Tania Pérez Córdova, Rainer Spangl and Sharon Ya'ari.

Echoes explores zones of transition and permeability: between inside and outside, between language and images, between visions and promises. In these transitions, memory becomes an invisible but formative medium that permeates the spaces and continually leaves new traces. The result is not only the echoing of past moments, but also the space in which the boundaries between reality and imagination become blurred. The works in this exhibition capture the subtle transformation of memories that echo within us, that shape us and slip away at the same time. They are like afterimages that manifest themselves in physical spaces as well as in our thoughts and feelings.

Rainer Spangl's painting is based on realistic depictions but approaches abstraction through the permanent repetition of motifs with minor changes. Spangl speaks of a "sober on-off relationship to abstraction", which is already inherent in the process of creating the works. In his works, he takes motifs from his private surroundings: Views of a face, of plants and areas of colour that evoke atmosphere or skin. The works are a painterly exploration of private interiors and exteriors as well as the pictorial medium and its limits.

Sharon Ya'ari's photographic works often show apparently everyday scenes and landscapes. For Ya'ari, the medium of photography is in a unique way capable of mastering the complex interrelationships between imagination, historical knowledge and the socio-political present.

Almost like architectural fragments, the plants in his new series of works appear as frozen contemporary witnesses and symbols of transience and development: “I'm identifying from my childhood photos, and family photos I took: all types and varieties of vegetation that grew, changed, and have been replaced in my yard over the years. During the past year, I've also been photographing the yard intentionally, and maybe I have done this before, too. In recent months, I've been photographing the annual weeds growing in the yard. I pull them out with their roots – which forces a photography timeframe of several minutes before they wilt.” (Ya’ari).

"There is a bronze contour that was cast in sand in a liquid state. An approximation to a real scale." (Pérez Córdova). In the Contours series, the outlines of windows, doors and passageways evoke memories of existing spaces and places and question the viewer's location. Concepts such as absence and disappearance are just as important to Tania Pérez Córdova as materiality. Her objects remain in a state of suspension, illuminating the origins of materials such as earth, metal, marble and glass and testing their limits. She explores production processes as a new way of seeing and thinking about objects and as a narrative means of investigating time, identities and places.

Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler use drawing to articulate ideas, establish relationships between forms and content and create open spaces for thought. In some cases, this results in images that contain both figurative and abstract elements or are often reminiscent of visual notes. The artists create an intimate, almost fragile atmosphere in which the boundary between what is said and what is unsaid becomes blurred. The often sketch-like or process-like drawings themselves become a medium of thought and experimentation, constantly evolving through observation and interpretation.

In Point de capiton (Hodja) (2016), Asier Mendizabal addresses the relationship between language, symbols and ideology and how this relationship often shifts. According to Jacques Lacan's theory, a "point de capiton" (literally "cushion button" or "quilting point") is a point at which language and meaning are fixed, i.e. a kind of anchorage in the otherwise floating network of signs and meanings. Mendizabal transfers this concept to a sculptural form and examines how ideological constructions can be stabilised through visual and material elements.

Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck's series of works Sub-entanglement woven-sustainable-emigrant, 2006–2008 is a complex examination of the themes of identity, migration and the networking of global structures. The central motif of this work is the "Unidad Residencial El Paraíso", a residential complex in Caracas, Venezuela, whose facade was designed by the Paris-based Venezuelan artist Alejandro Otero with a polychrome work. For Balteo-Yazbeck, “Woven” means the act of visually interweaving different narratives into a new composition. This principle manifests itself in the work on display through the layering of Alejandro Otero's paper collages and the black and white photographs of the complex, taken by Paolo Gasparini, an Italian photographer who emigrated to Venezuela in the 1950s.

“In the Manifestos, Mangelos carried on a dialogic and combative relation with everything he studied, and his range of interests was great including philosophy and art, psychoanalysis, biology and physics. Humour and irony were present in the manner in which he presented his thoughts: in the shift between the pretentiousness of the message and the wit of the sentence, in the way in which he criticized authorities and combined different languages.” (Branka Stipančić).

The red lines in Manifest o mišljenju no. 1 / manifesto on thinking no. 1, c.1977–1978 seem like an attempt to capture what is thought and written – as if the artist wanted to organise language and make its limits visible.

In Lajin IV (2020), Adriana Czernin combines various ornamental structures derived from a fragment of an Islamic ornament from the 13th century. Czernin multiplies the floral elements and arabesques of the marquetry and interweaves them with the strictly geometric lattice ornament – the result is a dense, almost impenetrable and wild structure that reflects the almost opaque connections of some memories.

Werner Feiersinger's sculptures are like signs in space. The object Untitled (2018) with its two diagonally positioned panels is covered with fabric soaked in red epoxy resin and rests on a structure of perforated metal supports. The tension between the translucent textile structure and the robust object lends the sculpture an unfinished character that breaks up the solid materiality. Despite its hardness, it almost seems to float and move freely in space. Feiersinger is concerned with fundamental questions about the relationship between object, space and viewer. "The forms come to me like memory images that are constituted over long periods of time and then manifest themselves sculpturally. At some point, these images solidify and reappear as reduced objects." (Feiersinger).

In her work, Nilbar Güreş explores social, cultural and political structures, especially in relation to women and marginalised groups. As part of her photo series Çırçır (2010), the work The Gathering reflects a communal as well as personal experience of the artist: a group of women gathering and sharing in a place of remembrance. Güreş creates a visual composition that focuses on both intimate and collective dimensions of coming together – bodies are interwoven, gazes and gestures create a silent but expressive interaction.