Paco Koenig / Focus On Melissa Steckbauer

Paco Koenig
Domi Reversi
Opening Reception:
Thursday, 22 January 2026
6 - 9 pm

Exhibition Dates:
23 January - 20 February 2026

In the new solo show of Paco Koenig (b. 1990), painting becomes a space for renewal, rather than an image to arrive at. Growing up between Berlin and annual summer retreats to a small island in the northern Aegean Sea, Koenig developed a rhythm of departure and grounding that continues to shape his practice. In this exhibition, that rhythm folds inward, as self-portraiture becomes a way of thinking through return as a creative state.

Presenting a new series of photorealistic paintings and abstract works on untreated aluminium, Koenig draws on the Latin phrase Domi Reversi, meaning “return to one’s origin,” recontextualizing the artist’s studio as more than a site of creative genesis. It becomes a space of accumulation and reconnection, where objects and tools, rough etchings and daubs of paint, register as traces of the self. Identity emerges obliquely, through inversion and withholding. The instant snap of a photograph is slowed, time stretching like putty, as he transposes these images into methodical, hyperrealistic paintings formed by slow, subtle brushstrokes, mirroring his durational practice of mark-making on industrial metal sheets.

Across Domi Reversi, the self remains unsettled, drifting between figure, tool, and surface. Metaphor, symbol, and material merge, producing an image of the artist beyond form. Here, self-portraiture moves beyond depiction, becoming a slow, methodical process of marking, withholding, and continual return.

Excerpt from a text by: Chris Erik Thomas

Focus On
Melissa Steckbauer
Am I Dreaming / on Titration
Opening Reception:
Thursday, 22 January 2026
6 - 9 pm

Exhibition Dates:
23 January - 20 February 2026

“The cadence of shifting from a universality to an individuated experiencing in this reality is that of a seasonally shifting waterfall: awash and overwhelmed by the richness of touches and motion or bare, simple, and slow in isolation. The impetus to reach for an understanding of this living is helpful but also evolutionarily young; it may return us to an understanding of ourselves as a singular vehicle and along with it: ego, trivialities, and an organisation of brain function principally geared toward survival. [Here we arrive at the most boring tropes of money and power.] Often grounded in somatics, a greater symbiosis can come with a big breath in of shared, surfeit being; an unconditional psychic net is thrown over – or better dragged from under – an imagined consciousness and an empathy so unwieldy is born of this that any attempt at judgement or the measure of experience and complexity is recognised as a missed-measure upon an unbounded landscape. When recognised for its value as a shared complexity, this brings luminance and resonance, co-, or “with-ness.” This non-conditional state is however unsustainable and a return to individuation, solidity, and often grief (or violence) quickly returns. This scaling up or down makes living musical.”

– Melissa Steckbauer