GOODBANK Presents Katharina Schücke: Spiegel, Frankfurt am Main

The mirror doesn't lie but it doesn't tell the truth either. It returns whatever faces it, calibrated by the choice of when to look, where to stand, and what to hold in front of the face. In that gap between control and reflection, Katharina Schücke has built a sustained body of work.

The mirror selfie is not a record of how someone looks. It is a record of how someone wants to be seen looking and Schücke's ink drawings make that distinction visible in the line itself.

GOODBANK is a Frankfurt non profit curatorial project located in Frankfurt am Main, founded and curated by Maja Dana Lisewski, that tends toward focused, precisely edited presentations. For Spiegel, the space holds twelve works arranged across a single room four positions plotted with near-diagrammatic clarity on the floor plan.

The geometry seems to mirror the exhibition's logic: each work on a separate axis, each claiming its own surface. Visitors move through the room the way one circles a mirror, testing angles, reconsidering what just appeared.

Schücke uses this image as a structuring metaphor: the figure recedes behind the drawing's own density, but the gesture of capture persists, indifferent to legibility. A self-portrait dissolving into darkness is still, the series seems to argue, preferable to no self-portrait at all.

What runs through all four positions is a particular tension between the logic of the source image, optimised, selected, repeated, and the logic of drawing, which is patient, intuitive, and committed to its own mistakes. The athletes Schücke depicts operate inside a visual economy where the mirror is never passive: it is a collaborator in a project of self-presentation calibrated for an audience that may or may not be watching.

Whether the drawings hold that mirror back, or simply reflect it differently, is a question the ink declines to settle.

Katharina Schücke on Instagram
GOODBANK INSTAGRAM
Maja Lisewski INSTAGRAM

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