Max Klinger’s painting Der pinkelnde Tod was created around 1880. It shows a skeleton peeing on its reflection in the lake. Klinger’s depiction of the baroque vanitas idea of the transience of all life and its narcissistic orientation led to controversial discussions at the time.
For her annual edition Katja Eckert takes up Klinger’s basic idea. In six drawings, a fragile skeleton figure struggles with the indignation of vanity and transience in an almost empty pictorial space: sometimes it tries to pee on its own image in the mirror on the wall – and fails because its own stream simply does not reach high enough. Sometimes it has to bear that the mirror fights back and now, for its part, pees at the bone being squatting on the floor. Or it finds itself together with another skeleton in a bizarrely beautiful urinating dance of death. A high quality of drawing and a traditional symbolic language are thus humorously and sarcastically reformulated into a very contemporary view of sensitivities such as transience and vanity.