WIDERSPRUCH

WIDERSPRUCH, 2026
 
WIDERSPRUCH is not a portrait of a completed self.
It presents a state in which origin, present existence, body, memory, resistance and imagination collide at once.
 
The work is constructed out of 17 hay-filled cushions. Their surfaces are painted, layered and partially torn open, exposing the organic material within. What would normally remain contained becomes visible. Hay functions simultaneously as origin, root and material memory, while the relief-like surface becomes a body that refuses to conceal its own construction.
 
Across this physical structure, BECKER builds a dense world of color, figures, beings, gazes and symbols. Individual motifs can appear humorous, aggressive, childlike, sexual or grotesque. Others resemble passages, landscapes, cosmic spaces or psychological states. None are separated into a clean hierarchy.
 
Contradictions remain intact.
Beauty exists beside overload.
Cuteness beside destruction.

Hope beside anger.
Body beside cosmos.
Origin beside departure.

The individual beside the collective.
 
At the center, a scream opens through the image. It can be read as protest, but equally as liberation, birth, or the moment when something can no longer remain inside its previous form.
 
Nearby is a white protest sign.
It is deliberately blank.
 
BECKER refuses the single statement, political demand or definitive word that could explain what the protest is directed against. The empty surface prevents a fixed message and transfers the sign to the viewer. What should be written on it changes with the person standing in front of the work.
This gives the German title WIDERSPRUCH its central tension: it means both objection and contradiction.
 
The composition follows the same logic. Movements rise and fall, lines intersect, figures appear and disappear. An underlying X-like structure turns the work into a point of intersection: different directions meet without resolving into one.
 
Phosphorescent media extend this instability beyond daylight. In darkness, individual areas remain active, shifting the relationship between surface and depth. The work therefore never settles into one completely fixed state.
 
WIDERSPRUCH understands identity not as an answer.
The self becomes a place where many lines arrive at once — roots and stars, past and present, creation and destruction, hope and resistance.
 
The contradiction does not need to be resolved.
It is part of the whole.