Shit Hits the Fan/ Marik Lechner
Curator: Nomy Borenstein
Maya Gallery, 18/4/25-31/5/25

For over three decades, Marik Lechner has been grappling with trauma. He has done so through his natural medium: fleshy, visceral oil paintings, saturated with matter and color, as if taken from Lucifer’s private playground. He’s also explored it in a series of epic wall tapestries – “paintings that swelled and grew hair,” as artist Yair Garbuz once described them. But this time, the trauma is anchored clearly in time and place: the rupture of October 7th, and the widening circle of violence in which we find ourselves planted, like scarecrows stripped of purpose.

The exhibition’s title, Shit Hits the Fan, is intentionally crude—echoing the raw, immediate language through which we now consume death: in newsfeeds, stories, memes. At its heart is a series of paper works created as a visceral chronicle of ongoing trauma: “It was a fever. I worked like I was possessed. Rag, hands, pencil, brush. I worked on the floor, poured water. It had a ritualistic quality.”

Paper, Lechner says, has a ghostlike presence — something close to thought, to consciousness itself. And indeed, the images seem caught in a moment untouched by processing. Working in pinks and purples, fiery tones, charcoal and black marker, Lechner moves between raw, aggressive expressionism and fragile, needling linework; between bodies consumed by red flames and a figure leaning into its own shadow; between childlike sketches and near-graphic scenes. Dozens of works, created in motion, unfold in a visual language of improvised signs scattered across a disaster zone, the works seem to say: the horror is always here—now—simmering just beneath our desperate attempts to maintain a semblance of daily routine.

Alongside the works on paper, Lechner presents an embroidery based on a WWII-era political cartoon. The sewing machine joins his textile toolbox — in his hands, all tools become brushes. The embroidery depicts Hitler and Mussolini "fixing" a disintegrating puppet-soldier. Lechner re-stitches the historical cartoon, dressing its graphic imagery in bold color, expressive gestures, and the macabre humor that defines his practice. 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 combination of grotesque and pop-art aesthetics fuels the dynamic energy of the work. Bold, clashing colors heighten the sense of chaos and hysterical urgency. Lechner works like a scavenger artist—or a dumpster diver—he cuts, pastes, and recycles fragments from other works. The original cartoon becomes raw material. In this post-truth age—where traditional hierarchies collapse and public figures are instantly cast as either heroes or villains—Lechner’s use of a WWII cartoon raises searing questions about the nature of good and evil today. The broken soldier is repaired over and over by deranged rulers and sent back to battle. The swastika — one of its arms elongating into a river of blood – is a visceral reminder that evil never disappears — it merely changes shape, adopting new masks under contemporary ideologies. In this sense, the embroidery captures the terror of war in an era where reality itself can be edited and repackaged—an age of agenda-driven media, sensational clips, and snuff-like testimonies flooding our consciousness.

Alongside the actual atrocities of war, we have also lost our grip on reality. What is truly happening? Everything breaks down into filtered, manipulated images—perpetually suspect in their authenticity.
In a time when the line between truth and spectacle, between testimony and propaganda, grows ever more blurred, Lechner offers a visual language where the personal and the historical are tightly interwoven. Painting, drawing, and embroidery become tools for critique and survival.

Nomy Borenstein