How Wide Is a Smile? poses an intentionally open question, describing a state in which perception shifts under visual overload. The smile becomes an unstable surface, oscillating between attraction and discomfort, familiarity and threat.

Max Brenner, part of the collective Brenner-Havelka-Plessl, presents paintings and textile screen prints based on image fragments gathered from the digital world. Researched, transformed, and manipulated by hand, scenes of crisis, violence, and uncertainty accumulate into dense visual networks. Rather than organizing this flood of information, Brenner intensifies it, challenging the act of seeing itself.

At the center, a goblin-like face emerges from a swarm of more than 140 individual motifs. From a distance it appears as a single image; up close, it dissolves into countless fragments that spread into surrounding works, forming a network of collective visual memory.

The wooden relief series Flowers extends this logic toward the aesthetics of violence. Models of atomic weapons are transformed into stylized objects resembling desirable commodities, exposing how even extreme forms of destruction can become aesthetic surfaces.

How Wide Is a Smile? ultimately asks: How much can a single gaze absorb when fear, information, beauty, and spectacle become inseparable?

Curator: Adina Guarnieri

Opening speech and artist talk together with: Peter Senoner

Photo© Tiberio Sorvillo