In his painterly practice over the last twenty years, Thomas Helbig has repeatedly explored the boundaries of the genre. He has worked with a wide variety of materials, using the most diverse painting grounds and media. With the paintings for the exhibition Die Zukunft der Heiligen he is now returning to the technique he originally used. The works are all executed in oil on canvas. Helbig also draws on formative elements from his own early work in terms of pictorial language. What emerges, however, is something completely new. Helbig combines symbolic references to the classical avant-garde with abstract motifs that evoke associations with cosmic phenomena and at the same time recall the moonlit night skies off Romanticism - albeit in close-up.
