Both aesthetically and with regards to content, the exhibition focusses on positions that explore the notion of oddness.
While representations of beauty often serve to obscure fissures, oddness may be understood as an access to more authentic perspectives. Where the idea of strangeness is being shifted to the foreground without redefining it as normality, a space emerges in which the normative power of the notion of normality begins to wane.
The discursive battles around notions of beauty and normality and their function in the arts have faded. Yet, the idea of perfection continues to exercise great fascination on the society. And while it refers to more and more constrained positions and constructs, representations of oddity have been increasingly approximated to fit to an idea of normality. Disrupting these dynamics, the works of Lauterlein and Leib render the notion of oddity accessible for identification, as they explore it without distorting it.
Importantly, the works of both Lauterlein and Leib do not stop at showing oddity as a merely aesthetic feature. Quite to the contrary, the works point to an internal feature that finds a symbolic materialisation on the faces and the bodies of the bizarre and strangely withdrawn figures. That they, the figures, still retain an element of approachability may be understood as an invitation to explore the core of their oddness and, ultimately, what we share with them: an all too natural oddity.