A painted horse stands in a meadow at night. Life-sized, drawn on paper in broad, dark violet brushstrokes, it is placed among a herd of real horses. At first, the animals keep their distance, but as their curiosity grows, hoofprints the following morning bear witness to a nocturnal encounter with the unfamiliar apparition. For a moment, the image has stepped out of the role assigned to it: it was observed, examined and touched, perhaps taken for a counterpart and answered as such. This equally simple and precise experimental setup reveals essential aspects of Johanna Wagner’s artistic practice: the photographs brought together in the exhibition mixed up by motion at PAW condense a multilayered process of painting, object and performative staging into pictorial spaces in which representation and reality continually shift into one another. Her works emerge in several interconnected phases. Painted forms are applied to supports, cut out and introduced into spatial situations, where they initiate actions and encounter an environment that eludes complete control. Photography captures these encounters without reducing them to their documentary content, instead bringing together the various elements of the artistic process to form new pictorial worlds. The directed flash picks out colours, bodies and objects from the darkness of night, while deep shadows, reflections and an intense use of colour lend the photographs a painterly quality in which Wagner’s pictorial thinking continues beyond the boundaries of individual media.

The starting point for the horse, for example, is an image from Eadweard Muybridge’s famous sequence The Horse in Motion. Muybridge’s photographic studies, made at the end of the nineteenth century, broke the gallop down into individual phases, making visible movements that had previously remained hidden from the human eye. Wagner takes a single figure from this early history of the moving image and continues the movement inherent in it beyond the historical motif, between different media, periods and forms of perception. A photographic sequence becomes a painted object; from its physical presence, an action develops that ultimately enters back into the photographic image. While in earlier works the artist often appeared in front of the camera herself, making her own body the centre of her stagings, in more recent works other protagonists, particularly animals, increasingly take her place. The artistic process thus opens itself up to a form of encounter that lies outside a human order of images and understands the animal as an acting and perceiving subject. This reversal touches upon a long art-historical tradition in which animals primarily appeared as motifs, symbols and projection surfaces for human ideas. This becomes particularly evident in hunting still lifes, where the bodies of slain animals bear witness to possession, wealth and human dominion over nature. The animal was visible, but its perspective remained excluded from the image. Wagner’s works shift this order: in one instance, for example, a film still from footage recorded by a wildlife camera is appropriated through painting and hung at the site in the forest where a fox had previously appeared. Whether the fox ever saw its own portrait remains unknown; however, Wagner recorded deer, a badger and several birds looking at the image. The photograph thus documents an act of reception whose meaning remains open and, precisely for this reason, calls into question the supposed unequivocal nature of the human gaze.

With the work Mezzo Mix, Wagner transfers similar questions to the history of the still life and its signs. The elements, painted in acrylic on cotton, applied to cardboard and cut out by hand, come together to form a movable installation in space. Wagner is particularly interested in the original linguistic image underlying the art-historically established term “Vanitas”. The Hebrew word häväl, which can be translated as “breath of wind”, was rendered as vanitas in the Latin Bible, and while Vanitas has, over the centuries, condensed into a fixed repertoire of images, the breath of wind retains for Wagner something fleeting and barely graspable. This notion finds its counterpart once again on a flag bearing the word “Windhauch” (“breath of wind”). It is carried, turned and dipped into water until its letters merge with their reflection and shift into new abstract forms. Language, too, appears as a material in motion, whose meaning is continually reassembled between writing, body and image.

Thus, the exhibition mixed up by motion unfolds as a constellation of images, gazes and translations. In the darkness, meadow, forest and water become temporary stages on which things step outside their familiar orders for a moment. The painted encounters the living, writing dissolves into reflection, and animals become viewers. Movement here signifies far more than a physical action: it encompasses the transitions between media as well as the transformation of meanings and perspectives. Wagner’s photographs condense these processes into images whose form emerges from encounter and remains permeable to its uncertainties.