What Becomes a Legend Most is the first exhibition at Sauers by Berlin-based artist Jill Winnie (*1998 in Winterthur, Switzerland). On view is a series of large-format oil paintings in which shiny leather, silky fabric, fur, or hair appear on velvety-toned surfaces—motifs that could have come from luxury advertising, reduced to close-ups and surfaces intended to evoke desire. However, in Winnie's work, this aesthetic is not simply quoted but transformed with delicate embroidery, roses, animal motifs, or glittering ornaments. Her paintings are opulent pictorial spaces in which desire, memory, and personal gesture intersect. 

The basis of her painting is a classic technique: a grisaille underpainting, familiar from the art of the Old Masters. But what is layered on top is entirely her unique language—translucent layers of color in candy pink, sepia, or violet, followed by lovingly painted appliqués reminiscent of children's crafts, kitsch, or fashion. These layers seem like interventions—emotional, tender, and at times exuberant. 

Winnie is inspired by advertising images she recognizes from glossy magazines – images she grew up with as a child while her mother worked as a hairdresser. These visual worlds – soft-focus, seductive, far removed from her own everyday life – fascinated her from an early age. That's when she began to rework the magazines: with watercolors, stickers, and fabric scraps. She decorated, painted over, and appropriated the images. This childlike gesture of appropriation, of decorating, and overpainting, now forms the core of her artistic practice. 

This attitude is particularly evident in her new works. The canvases appear like heightened, intimate devotional images for something that was never truly tangible—the perfect object, the perfect self-image, the perfect life. The elaborately painted surfaces seem almost sacred: one wants to touch them, like a photograph one loves. The ornament here is not an accessory, but an act. It is what changes the image, charges it, makes it personal. It represents attention—and a form of devotion. 

The exhibition title is borrowed from an iconic advertising slogan: "What Becomes a Legend Most"—once used to promote mink coats with celebrities. But Jill Winnie doesn't pose the question anew; she answers it in her unique way: It's not the object that becomes a legend, but the gesture. The desire to own something, to adorn it, to love it – even if it remains unattainable. In a world where we desire images more than things, her paintings become personal relics. They tell of how identity, femininity, and desire are shaped by images across generations – and of how one creates one's image of them with glitter, embroidery, and paint.