Night Mode: On. A gesture, almost incidental. The head sinks into the hand, the glossy red takeaway bag presses into the flesh of the fingers, salt tingles on the tongue, the light beam flickers across the surface. These are moments in between, intimate and familiar, yet strangely distant. You step closer, almost feeling part of a scene in Elisa Breyer's painting, but at the same time, you realise: you remain on the outside.
The works in Breyer's solo exhibition waiting for connection… live off the tension between proximity and detachment. The artist draws her subjects from personal archives, pop culture imagery, and fleeting moments. Their transformation into paintings gives them a new dimension—a matte, almost digital sheen. Breyer’s painterly vocabulary plays with shimmering colours, blending surfaces that seem digital with the tactile materiality of oil painting. This raises the question: do these images reflect a "real" world, or do they negotiate the impossibility of experiencing reality directly—at a time of digital aesthetics and staged Instagram realities?
In her style, there is a peculiar calm, a clarity that almost feels cool—like a detached tone that tells a story without pushing itself on you. It is precisely in this that a special intensity unfolds: the scenes keep us at a distance, not allowing us to fully enter, and in doing so, they create space for reflection and projection. From this distance, the social stage becomes palpable—where belonging and self-performance unfold. Her figures naturally move through urban spaces, intuitively understanding which objects, gestures, and codes embody the Zeitgeist.
Breyer’s portraits are embedded in picture spaces that function like still lifes. Alongside the figures, objects appear repeatedly, seemingly placed casually, yet they reveal much about their owners. These are not mere props but clues to social behaviour—testimonies of milieus, fashion, and urban life. The sushi on the edge of the bathtub, the wired headphones, the shiny sunglasses—not decoration, but markers of an attitude. Like a city apartment that almost arranges itself, the paintings expose a sense of the invisible rules that shape our present.
For young women in cities, this means a balancing act between self-empowerment and conformity. The codes are mastered, used, and playfully exaggerated—yet they remain part of a web that promises belonging but also carries a sense of distance. With pop cultural references, from Sex and the City to pop music—Breyer takes a quiet look at both self-confidence and moments of hesitation, authenticity and the performance of lifestyle.
In waiting for connection…, a state of suspension emerges: the scenes are close, almost intimate, yet unreachable. They speak of friendship and tenderness, pop culture and urban reality, but also of the quiet doubt of where connection is even possible. In an age where city life is increasingly shaped by consumption, disembodied communication, and commercialisation, Breyer makes visible this soft, in-between space—while simultaneously searching for connection. Perhaps the poignancy and beauty of Breyer's paintings lie precisely in this ambiguity.

Text: Marlene Sichelschmidt & Leonie Rösler