(Top) Franziska Sinn, Kaflee find ich gut Still Life 180x180cm 2007 detail. (Bottom left) John Midgley, Louis Boston Portrait 120x90cm 2006 detail. (Bottom right) Niklas Weise, Pinacchio Portrait 60x70cm 2006 detail. Ulrich Lamsfuss's "Glass Bee" solo exhibition is on display at Daniel Templon Gallery from May 31 to July 26.

Ulrich Lamsfuss (born 1971, lives and works in Berlin) is a young German artist, one of the few continuing to cultivate painting today. His super-realistic paintings explore the implications of images themselves (life, society, politics), or question the roots of our visual culture, using images to challenge images—a potentially anti-art conscious act? In an era of either the death or eternal life of painting, what could be more powerless or impotent than painting? Yet, despite this powerlessness, painting remains defiant amidst the surging wave of "newness" and trends. Painting becomes anti-image, post-painting itself, or simply image—photographs that look like paintings. In the postmodernism where white rice becomes cooked rice, painting often reshapes new myths of images (as seen in contemporary Chinese painting). Undeniably, in the international art market, painting remains the primary "hot fish."

The theme of Ulrich Lamsfuss's "Glass Bee" (Abelle de verre) solo exhibition comes from the brilliant novel by Ernst Jünger. The glass bee metaphorically represents the banal world of images under current media difficulties. Through the artist's careful interpretation, he re-translates these images with superb skill, questioning the impossibility of the painting dead-end (impossibility being one of all possible paths). In this solo exhibition, Ulrich Lamsfuss displays 20 paintings, all inspired by exquisite or famous photographs from newspapers and magazines (news, fashion trends, movies, advertisements, and even contemporary photography books). Under diverse themes ranging from portraits, landscapes, still lifes, religious paintings to animal paintings, he uses these selected images (like painting texts), enlarging and depicting them according to the text. With the artist's excellent and skilled technique, his delicate brushwork is astonishing, resembling the confusing embroidery of each stroke. Under these excellent perfect images, refined skills, and emotional subjects, he presents aesthetics popular with the masses, social allegories, and political symbols within consumer society.