Björn Holzweg, Elmar Lause & Marc Burckhardt

As the year draws to a close, the nights grow longer, and silence begins to settle over the streets, dreams start to whisper to reality. The final exhibition of 2025 at Affenfaust Galerie opens a portal into that in-between world where things are not what they seem—yet appear as if they might be true.

With the title Dreams are my reality, the exhibition not only quotes a pop-cultural line from Richard Sanderson’s song of the same name, but also evokes an entire mood: that vague, bittersweet drifting between memory and imagination, where reality and desire mirror one another.

In this dense, three-voiced narrative, three artistic positions meet—each capturing the surreal, the hidden, and the everyday in its own distinct visual language.

Marc Burckhardt paints with the gravitas of past centuries and the eyes of the present. His works draw on the aesthetics of Old Master portraits and panel paintings, yet they are threaded with symbols, animals, emblems, and ornaments that resist clear interpretation. The finely crafted surfaces of his paintings are not windows but mirrors: one looks into them and finds oneself reflected as a figure in a mythological scene that belongs neither to the past nor to the future. Perhaps a dream. Perhaps an allegory.

Elmar Lause is a storyteller of fragments. Using everyday objects, found materials, painting, and collage, he constructs poetic and humorous worlds that feel like models of an absurd cosmos. His assemblages resemble cinematic snapshots from a universe that only appears to follow our visual habits—before subtly subverting them through delicate ruptures, ironic twists, or double-edged titles. Lause’s humor is never shallow, but precisely placed—like a quiet laugh in a dream that you can no longer explain once awake.

Björn Holzweg draws powerful, image-rich scenes in charcoal and pencil—floating between wilderness and memory, instinct and inner movement. His works feel like charged places—deserted yet full of presence. Animals, fragments, and wide, silent spaces unfold a distinctive symbolism: raw, direct, never decorative. Holzweg’s drawings are not narratives—they are states, traces, inner landscapes. You do not encounter them by accident.