Hortensia Mi Kafchin has titled her third solo exhibition at Galerie Judin Cheerful Melancholia. On the one hand, this refers to an ambivalent emotional state. On the other hand, she refers to a German Renaissance artist who was one of the first ever to depict himself as an artist. This marked the beginning of a tradition of artistic self-reflection that Kafchin continues today in a way that is as poignant as it is unsettling.

The inspiration for Kafchin’s exhibition title and the eponymous painting is Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I. Kafchin has catapulted the angel lost in thought into the 21^st century. Certainly not an easy awakening for a creature from the Early Modern Age. While Dürer’s melancholy is triggered by deep inner feelings, Kafchin’s culprit is the digital parallel universe. The Internet appears as a voracious monster in the form of a cell phone. With its large, neon-yellow teeth, it pulls the swiping figure into its abysses. As in this painting, Kafchin always deploys a whole arsenal of symbolic attributes that bear witness to various stages of the artist’s life; here, for example, the Pride flag as proof of her trans identity or the angle grinder that alludes to her training as a sculptor.

At almost six meters in width, Kafchin addresses the beginning of her rocky life path in her monumental Drained Danube. The ship with an oversized compass is a symbol of the young artist who tried to navigate her way from the Romanian hinterland to Western Europe and the international art scene. But the ship initially ran aground in the Romanian city where she was born. Breaking free is out of the question. Making it from this backward place to cosmopolitan Berlin, where the artist now lives, demanded a great deal of her. To endure her challenging self-development, the child Kafchin early on took refuge in a fairytale world, which pervades the painting in the form of cute or grotesque figures.