The exhibition brings together more than 190 works from different eras and contexts and addresses both contentual and formal issues. Seven thematic areas formulate artistic approaches to depicting the human being, develop a current picture of Germany, engage in multifaceted play with everyday life or the medium of the book, and investigate minimalist tendencies, photographic procedures or aesthetic contradiction. And with Mel Chin an artist’s bar even makes an appearance.

Internationally, numerous artists have dealt directly or indirectly with olfactory aspects in their artist publications. This was done on the one hand through a conceptual examination and on the other hand by dealing with materials that smell.

The Italian artist Luca Vitone (*1964, lives in Milan) traces the manifold imprints that are deposited in spaces and determine both their appearance and our idea of them. In creating his conceptual portraits of different places, he incorporates emotional as well as cultural, social as well as historical, economic as well as political aspects. Since the 1980s, he has used film, painting, photography, installation, audio piece, or scent installation to pose questions about memory of and longing for home, about migration and the representation of spaces.

With Richard Prince (*1949) and Peter Piller (*1968), two artists focusing respectively on American myths and the realities of life in Germany — different generations, diverse worlds —, there is an encounter at the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art between two extremely original artistic oeuvres offering exemplary presentations of life and thought in and through pictures.