Bless you!

The visual artist and musician FINN STANGLMEIER suffers from the interpersonal consequences of the Corona pandemic. He had to experience that many people became more unfriendly, more distrustful, sometimes even verbally abusive also on himself. The physical distance made necessary by the pandemic grew into a mental distance with each month of further lockdowns and minimum distancing. Finn's surreal, comic-like figures speak for themselves: exaggeratedly large, striking and expressive, the visibly suffering. Surrounded by evil-looking eyes, disparagingly tilted corners of the mouth, anger-distorted grimaces; a fist raised in a threatening gesture, hands accusing. - Hostility captured on cardboard. The Augsburg artist confronts people on a crowded train with this. The oversized painting is disturbing. The life-size man in the painting, coughing and spreading viruses, seems like a provocation in the dense crowd. But the faces of the passengers, hidden behind masks, remain uninvolved, averted. No one asks questions, seeks contact. Everyone focuses on himself. - Interaction has died. An image that also questions our behavior. In another installation, he placed the image in the boiler room of the catacombs under the museum of the monastery. The abandoned cellar room - architectural symbol of the loneliness of each individual during the pandemic and of being reduced to oneself. Under the ground, trapped behind thick walls, it is impossible to see beyond. The valves and pressure gauges - signs of the pressure that the introduced Corona measures put on the individual and cannot be released. Finn Stanglmeier‘s work shows how the dealings with our fellow people has suffered. Covid was something new. There will be more pandemics. How to deal with it must be learned, the multifaceted suffering of people must be minimized. The tension-laden works virtually urge for a resolution, for attention instead of ignorance, for conversation instead of silence, for trust instead of mistrust. They invite us to reconsider our own behavior.