Markus Manowski (born 1977, Zabrze, Poland) is a multifaceted artist with strong ties to Eastern Europe. Well known under his artist name Daze Maxim, he created a substantial body of work as a musician, producer and performer in the field of electronic music.

The artist's first solo show at L'Atelier-ksr, titled 'Nothing Can Go Wrong', will showcase a series of paintings in various formats. The artworks are characterized by complected compositions, formally aligned to varying states of mind to create a dialogue between the painter, his environment, and his medium. Rather than following a certain style, each work engenders a sense of connection to the next, creating a series that dissects the artist's sense of identity along a traceable and disorderly line.

After a childhood spent in a communist regime, Markus Manowski came of age in West Germany. This experience of a radical shift in the social environment is embodied in his work as an intrusion into the structure of consciousness, an upheaval not markedly damaging but one that is nevertheless reflected in the processes and visual language of the pieces.

A major component of the artist's work is the reassembling of the pictorial elements of found photographs, alongside a deconstruction of images from his own archive of pictures and drawings. In this phase of research, Manowski also explores the realm of the digital, its consequences and coincidences, evoking a new sense of the 'social mind'.

The careful balance of the paintings is fraught by the extraction and decontextualisation of single elements, which leads to a liberation of values and meanings. In the fade of colors, the artist detracts from the identities of the individual objects, using the canvas to frame each as a pure appearance pervaded by abstract fragments. The paint is applied roughly and thickly, a surface with a topography that contrasts with the finely layered objects and figures. Through the composition and its material manifestation, Manowski explores and questions the definition and usage of cultural identity, dissecting the remnants of the individual sense of being within a collective movement.

Following a progressive narrative, the artist uses a dark palette to piece together atmospheres and moments that bound between the gloomy and the sublime. The work exudes a haziness bound in a sense of place and history. The subconscious emerges, visualized by subtle fractures in the pictorial narrative.

Manowski's paintings allegorize a universalized psyche, a snapshot of a collective subconscious rendered immobile by the passage of time.