Wonderland

One cannot help but think of Henri Rousseau, the publican, who exhibited as a self-taught artist together with Paul Gauguin at the Salon der Unäbgängigen in Paris and inspired Picasso and Dadaists such as Tristan Tzara with his "naive realism". The Vienna-based artist Ellen Semen (*1971) sometimes takes up Rousseau's formal language, not to unabashedly show the idyll of the world, but rather the disproportions within it. She places "Sharp shooters", the title of one of her paintings, in the midst of flowers and thematizes (sexual) violence, war and the hypocrisy of politics and the media.