The Nuremberg artist Michael Munding uses painting to explore the iconographic, historical and political messages of picture postcards. For many years, he has been producing copies of landscapes, monuments and masterpieces from art history, mainly in large formats. The pictures are often given a high-gloss coating to make the link with the medium of the postcard even more obvious. Some also feature the kinds of lettering and framing elements that are typical of such souvenirs.
Photorealism, Pop Art, Junk Art and conceptual painting have all shaped his approach. Cheaply purchased, the found image material reveals a great deal about twentieth-century tourism and the tastes of this period. In his work, Munding picks up where painting left off in the nineteenth century with the dawn of Modernism.
At the Neues Museum, Munding has filled the façade spaces with his large-format adaptations that raise many questions, including that of the role of painting today.