ZERP Gallery presents group exhibition The Uncanny, with paintings by Andrej Dubravsky (SK), Miriam Vlaming (DE), Jarik Jongman (NL) and Anne von Freyburg (NL). They are accompanied by sculptures from Virgilius Moldovan (AU).
The eerie feeling you get when you experience something that is on the verge of the ordinary, but seems strange. When you are in a new place but it feels like you’ve been there before. That is the feeling we call uncanny, or unheimlich. It is a feeling Freud used as a starting-point to draw out the mind’s hidden secrets; it is something that is connected to the core of identity and unprejudiced fears during infancy.
When looking at the people and spaces in these works, you are touched by the combination of familiarity and estrangement they evoke. A sense of identification and recognition is blended with the fear of the unknown. It is the fear of the possibility of the presence of the supernatural, like a living sculpture or meeting your own double. Some of the works focus on a human aspect that unsettles you, while others seem to be frighteningly more real than yourself.
