Image: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein
‘Somnium’ brings together painting, digital image worlds, photography and 3D rendering to investigate the relationship between facts, speculation, emotion and image production.
The exhibition frames contemporary media ecologies as hybrid narrative spaces in which facts, speculation, emotion and image production are inseparably intertwined; rather than claiming truth, the image reflects on its own manipulative power.
Two sculptures, ‘Nachtmahr I’ and ‘Nachtmahr II’, take individual figures from Henry’s paintings and translate them into three dimensions, expanding his artistic practice into sculpture. Born in Munich in 1996, Henry studied economics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, curating at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and fine art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he completed his studies in Daniel Richter’s class.
The exhibition’s title comes from Johannes Kepler’s book ‘Somnium’, whose Latin title means ‘dream’: first written in 1609 and published posthumously in 1634, it is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential works of scientific fiction. In that work, radical astronomical ideas—especially the Copernican worldview—are placed within a fictional structure so that they can be imagined, discussed and made socially acceptable.
Kepler’s ‘Somnium’ describes a fictional lunar civilization through a dream journey in which people travel to the Moon with the help of spirits and demons in the central shadow of a solar eclipse; alongside these fantastic elements, the text gives scientific accounts of weightlessness, climatic conditions and the extreme differences between day and night, 360 years before the first people reached the Moon. This combination of fantastic and real elements is reflected symbolically in the image themes of Marc Henry presented at the Kunstverein.
