INTO OTHER HANDS
Dieter Mammel
Rubens Präg
paintings, work on paper
05-09 through 04-10-2026
opening Saturday 5 September at 16:00 hours
the artists are present
Galerie Maurits van de Laar opens the new season with the duo show INTO OTHER HANDS by Dieter Mammel (1965) and Rubens Präg (1996) who started making collaborative paintings some years ago in their project Waterworld 1 + 2. The gallery represents Dieter Mammel since 1996 and is pleased to present a new chapter in his career and welcomes Rubens Präg to this exhibition.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the encounter between two distinct visual languages: Mammel’s monochrome, often atmospherically condensed pictorial worlds meet Präg’s subtly coloured constellations of figures. Their collaboration unfolds in different ways—through collage, overpainting, or direct joint work on a single pictorial surface. In Waterworld 1 + 2, drawn interventions enter into an open exchange with the existing image; in Happy 1 + 2, pictorial spaces overlap in a collage-like manner; while in Children’s Game, both artists work simultaneously on a shared visual organism. Yet each artist’s individual signature remains clearly recognizable. Mammel’s recurring motif of hands engaged in the game of cat’s cradle, for example, retains its autonomy while also becoming a playful metaphor for the exhibition as a whole. The title Into Other Hands points to the essence of this collaboration: the trust required to place one’s own work into the gaze, intervention, and imagination of another.
Through the interplay of two generations, a multifaceted universe unfolds, shaped as much by joy and humor as by melancholy, vulnerability, and an awareness of transience.
What unites both artistic positions is a belief in the inexhaustible power of painting: its ability to tell stories, to destroy images, and to bring forth new ones. Präg’s works draw upon the immediacy of family life, particularly the creative exchange with his daughter Mette, as well as the uncertainties and searching movements of his generation. Mammel’s imagery, by contrast, often opens into the cinematic and narrative: from the twin figures, the Twins, inspired by the vampire film Sinners, to the self-assured gestures of Iranian women, and the poetic apparition of a Madonna as a genie from a bottle. His portraits depict women as both strong and vulnerable, and self-determined figures.
In this way, the exhibition itself becomes a large collage. Individual works enter into dialogue with one another, transcending the boundaries of singular authorship and coalescing into a shared whole. The artistic ego recedes into the background in favour of an open exchange between two artist of different generations. Apart from the collaborative works both artists also show individual paintings.
The exhibition is accompanied by a small publication.