HFBK

Assuming that seeing is an active act, Pythagoras describes the eye in ancient Greek thought as a sender of “visual rays,” whose vectors scan reality. For him, seeing is a productive practice. The exhibition Introducing: The Crumb by Philine Mayr transfers this idea into a contemporary image context. It advances the thesis that seeing is both the apprehension of the world and its production. In this way, the notion of perspective shifts from the ordering of an external space to a projection originating from within the viewer.

Mayr’s artistic practice probes the conditions of image formation and investigates which aesthetic decisions bring images into being and how formal criteria shape their perception. Her works are based on a painterly engagement with a growing photographic archive. Often, she focuses on specific image fragments, approaching them through a combination of conceptually structured and “seeing” modes of working. Central to this is the investigation of how light structures the construction and perception of (spatial) visibility and corporeality.

In Introducing: The Crumb, Mayr proceeds from a speculative proposition: from a fixed, inaccessible point within a column at the outer corner of the exhibition space, the eye appears as a projection apparatus—comparable to a projector—from which images inscribe themselves into the space. The central work, The Crumb (2026), thus appears as the projection of an inner image. Mayr conceives the physical canvas as a permeable image surface, behind which the image content continues across the walls of the space in distorted, shifted, and perspectivally fractured forms.

Beyond addressing the relationship between production, reception, and illusion, the exhibition also engages with the translation between analogue and digital, which becomes visible, among other things, in the canvas’s 16:9 format. Driven by a searching movement directed toward an image core, Mayr breaks down the centerpiece of the exhibition into its constituent elements: surface, colour, motif. The wall paintings emerge from an active process of reduction, in which colour is diminished and plasticity is withdrawn. If the eye is understood as projective, they can be read as residues of inner images—fragments of what is projected outward from within, without ever fully coinciding.