HOLY SHIT

With “Holy Shit”, Alex Lebus transforms the Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch into an atmospherically dense parcours, in which the sacred and the profane, the corporeal and the spiritual encounter one another in a multilayered dialogue. The point of departure is the history of the site as a former public lavatory – a “quiet place” shaped by intimacy, vulnerability, and the act of letting go. Lebus translates this everyday sphere into an expanded field of meaning, where religious symbolism, ritual gestures, and existential questions interweave. The tiled interiors, oscillating in appearance between bathhouse and slaughterhouse, become a stage for narrative and material superimpositions. In thematically defined rooms – from the Mother Room to the Blood Room – a dramaturgy unfolds that shifts between defilement and purification, revelation and concealment. Visitors are invited to discover, through self-contemplation, areas hitherto hidden within themselves. Mirror, wax, glass, wood, and pigmented paper form a dense material language that transforms the austerity of the original stark space into an entirely new aesthetic. Christian iconographies constitute a recurring point of reference: depictions of the Virgin Mary, the figure of Mary Magdalene, or the dove as a symbol of the Holy Spirit are released from their familiar context and led into a space between devotion and critical rupture. Thus Mary Magdalene – who in art history oscillates between apostle, penitent, and legend – appears as a projection surface for questions of gender, attribution, and self-empowerment. “Holy Shit” does not conceive of the sacred as a fixed system of belief, but expands it, in the sense of a confrontation with reality, by essential dimensions. The exhibition invites us to renegotiate the relations between faith, the body, and the public sphere – poetically, confrontationally, and in manifold ambiguities. Alex Lebus takes the familiar standing Madonna with mantle – an iconographic type widely disseminated in art history, often referred to as the Schutzmantelmadonna (Virgin of the Protective Cloak) – and translates it into a transformed form. Central to this is the fold of the mantle, which in tradition stands for shelter, protection, and transcendence, and which in Lebus’ works opens into the shape of a vulva – a motif that marks both origin and taboo, life and vulnerability. Especially in the Mother Room, where the Madonna figures are assembled in glass vitrines and presented upon pedestals – elevated and at the same time protected – and where this very image programmatically defines the public visual identity of the exhibition, the tension between sacred icon and corporeal reality becomes most palpable. They are “Wackelbilder”: images that unite dignity and carnality, elevation and revelation, in an inseparable simultaneity. The revelation of what is forbidden here is no blasphemy, but rather a reality-oriented unveiling – a pictorial constellation that does not divide spirituality and corporeality, faith and life, but calls them forth in ambivalent simultaneity.