Fausto Amundarain
May 29, 2026 – July 10, 2026
forever wildchild
Galerie Heike Strelow
In Fausto Amundarain’s works, collage is visible—but not in the traditional sense. There are no cut-out pieces of paper, no mounted fragments. What the eye perceives as collage is created entirely through painterly means: layering, fragmentation, and the deliberate juxtaposition of visual worlds. The starting point is imagery from the world of comics—a collective visual memory of popular culture. Amundarain does not adopt anything directly. He extracts structures, rhythms, and moments of tension and translates them into his own language. Airbrush, screen printing, transfer technique: each method brings its own aesthetic, while acrylic paint unites them all. The result is technically brilliant—and at the same time raises a fundamental question: What is creativity, if not the ability to transform the existing in such a way that something unexpected emerges?
This transformation also takes place in terms of content. Layers, fragmentations, and trompe-l’œil elements shift the boundaries between surface and space, image and object. The paintings appear as theatrical spaces, as cinematic settings in which identities are constructed, concealed, and dissolved again. How do people use roles, images, and symbols to protect themselves or reinvent themselves? Identity does not appear as a fixed state, but as something performative. Figures move, flee, disappear behind projections, or seek refuge in invented personas.
At the same time, Amundarain opens up a deeply personal pictorial space. Children’s drawings, early murals, and archived traces of the past become starting points for an inward-looking exploration. Memories emerge in fragments and remain deliberately incomplete. What becomes visible is not a linear narrative, but a process of uncovering, revising, and reappropriating.
The Italian term attrezzo—prop, tool, stage element—gives the exhibition its title and its metaphor. In Amundarain’s work, the prop becomes a metaphor for the construction of identity, memory, and social visibility. Herein lies an unexpected kinship with artificial intelligence: AI, too, draws upon stored patterns and structures to generate something new. Yet while the machine combines, the hand decides—and in the hand lies the power.
Heike Strelow Gallery
Lange Str. 31
60311 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours
Wed–Fri 12 noon–6 p.m.
Sat 12 noon–3 p.m.