Marik Lechner

Marik Lechner: A Lookout

Following the tragic events of October 7th in Israel, referred to here as “Black Sabbath,” my reality froze in time. The relentless evidence of the horrific violence perpetrated by Hamas was beyond anything I could comprehend. With each retaliatory attack on Hamas in Gaza and the unyielding continuation of the war, the cycle of violence kept growing, ensnaring more innocent lives in ist expanding web.

In my art, I explore themes of trauma, the grotesque, the explosive outpouring of raw emotion—a macabre carnival of evil and death—and the absurdity that so often accompanies horror. At first, reality and the surreal seemed to merge; then the surreal took over, replacing reality and pushing it to unimaginable extremes.

For as long as I can remember, I have worked with paper. It is immediate, accessible—a medium that allows me to create even in the midst of daily life, while in motion, without the elaborate preparations required for oil painting. In that sense, paper is deeply embedded in my consciousness. When working on paper, the material itself takes on an almost spectral quality. A few lines, a quick sketch, and suddenly the image comes alive.

In the months following October 7th, I immersed myself in an intense series of works on paper, each piece a raw chronicle of the unfolding trauma. Created day by day as the horrors of the pogrom came to light, these works bear witness to the devastation. In the exhibition, you will find aselection of these pieces—visions of wailing sirens, missiles streaking across the sky, bullet-riddled walls, lifeless bodies, and homes reduced to charred ruins.

I have named this series “Shit Hits the Fan”, an intentionally crude name—echoing the raw, immediate language through which we now consume death: in newsfeeds, stories, memes. Paper has a ghostlike presence—something close to thought, to consciousness itself. Created in motion, these paper works unfold in a visual language of improvised signs scattered across a disaster zone.

Nomy Borenstein: The Puppetmasters: Reframing History with Thread. On Marik Lechner’s Embroidered Work

The embroidered piece marks a striking revolution in Marik Lechner’s practice, both technically and conceptually. Known for pushing the limits of technique and medium, Lechner here employs a sewing machine for the first time, treating freehand embroidery like brushstrokes in a painting. This approach builds on his earlier experiments with tufting machines in tapestry works shown at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Givon Art Forum in Tel Aviv, and L’Space Art Gallery in New York.

What sets this piece apart is Lechner’s engagement with existing imagery—an unprecedented move in his practice. The starting point is a provocative American World War II cartoon portraying Hitler and Mussolini repairing a broken doll, symbolizing the Axis alliance.

Lechner reimagines this historical image through vibrant, layered embroidery. Contemporary elements enter the scene—a missile, a mushroom, an alien figure lying at the bottom—forming a kind of vertical reading of evil’s iconography: from eruption at the top, through laborious daily violence, down to the quiet hell below. The alien—an otherworldly witness to the human theatre of violence, as if saying: “I came, I was buried, and no one noticed”.

The grotesque figures, with their exaggerated features, are in line with the tradition of political caricature, yet their three-dimensional, tactile rendering in fabric adds an unsettling physicality. The torn and frayed edges of the textile, combined with aggressive stitching and chaotic composition, amplify a sense of disarray and violence, mirroring the themes of war, destruction, and distorted power.

The blend of grotesque figures and pop-art aesthetics contributes to the dynamic energy of

the composition. The vibrant, contrasting colors—reds, blues, yellows, and greens—further intensify the chaotic nature of the scene, heightening its sense of dissonance and manic urgency. Swirling patterns of color clash against the defined yet distorted figures, reinforcing the surreal and unsettling atmosphere.

The depiction of a soldier-doll with a fractured, stitched-together body suggests a commentary on the dehumanization of war, where individual identity is fragmented and reconstructed by political forces.

In an era of post-truth, where traditional hierarchies collapse and contemporary figures are swiftly assigned the roles of heroes and villains, the resurfacing of the past raises critical questions about the nature of good and evil in the present.

The fractured soldier, pieced back together by deranged leaders, is once again thrust into battle—his identity manipulated and repurposed for war. The provocative swastika is reshaped and distorted—one of its red arms elongates, as if morphing into a river of blood. No longer a rigid emblem of authoritarian control, it becomes an unstable, shifting entity—a visceral reminder that evil does not vanish, but mutates and spreads, adapting to new ideologies and cloaking itself in ever-changing disguises.

In this sense, Lechner’s work encapsulates the heightened anxiety of our times. Alongside the tangible horrors of war—malevolence, violence, destruction, and loss—our very sense of reality has been taken from us. What is truly happening? What is good, and what is evil? Everything is reduced to sanitized, manipulated images, their authenticity ceaselessly questioned. The result is a distorted representation of an already distorted reality.

This embroidery, with its fusion of historical and contemporary references, stands as a powerful statement on the instability of truth and the cyclical nature of war and propaganda. Through the labor-intensive process of embroidery—traditionally associated with domesticity and craft—Lechner subverts expectations, transforming thread into a tool for political and existential critique. The work is not just an image; it is an object, a stitched-together fragment of history and memory, demanding to be read, touched, and reckoned with.