Hand & Screen

Hand & Screen approaches painting as a process rather than a style. It brings together three artistic positions that unfold along a shared axis: the relationship between digitality and analog practice. Not as an opposition, but as a continuum. Between hand, screen, and simulation, a field of tension emerges in which images are conceived, produced, and read today.

Simon Modersohn represents a radically analog point of departure. His works are created entirely without any digital pre-stage. Yet they are anything but retrospective. Spaces, houses, and landscapes appear as mental storage sites—quiet, reduced, slightly displaced. Modersohn’s painting operates with a controlled coolness that recalls photographic or cinematic framings without ever citing them directly. The digital here is not a tool, but a cultural condition: a mode of perception, a horizon of expectation, a latent order behind the visible.

Eduard Kiesmann positions himself in between. His works initially emerge digitally—on the iPad—yet are consistently translated into oil painting. The screen functions as a sketching surface, a thinking space, not as an end product. In the subsequent analog process, motifs condense: floral forms, interior spaces, ornamental structures. Kiesmann’s paintings carry the precision and speed of the digital within them, but deliberately relinquish these qualities in favor of materiality, time, and resistance. The digital is not displayed as such; it is absorbed into paint.

Niko Princen works entirely within the digital realm. His image sources are drawn from video games—simulated landscapes, generated horizons, algorithmically constructed spaces. From these environments, Princen extracts individual frames and transfers them into the context of painting. The canvas becomes a projection surface for a reality that has never existed physically, yet feels visually familiar. Nature appears as a product of code, perspective as the result of engine logic, reality as a decision.

Together, these three positions articulate an expanded understanding of painting. It is not the technique that determines contemporaneity, but the way perception, image production, and reality are negotiated. The exhibition does not present painting as a nostalgic counter-movement to the digital, but as a reflective space in which digital images, analog gestures, and cultural imprints intersect.

What emerges is not an either–or, but a precisely calibrated in-between:

Painting after the screen.
Painting with the screen.
Painting despite the screen.