Philip Grözinger – Manntje, Manntje, Timpe Te

Grimm’s fairy tales reliably provoke horror. Because, well… they’re not exactly peaceful bedtime stories. And they are certainly not for children. Before you know it, you’re dealing with chopped‑off hands, gouged‑out eyes, or third‑degree burns. All without trigger warnings.

The Grimm tales were originally a collection of oral narratives, and you can easily imagine how they were told: with devotion, suspense, a feel for timing, and a spark of humor that doesn’t cancel out the horror, but makes it bearable. The audience was meant to shudder, but also to laugh and feel safe, because the story promised a kind of order otherwise missing. By the end, evil is punished, good is rewarded, and the world is restored. It was satisfying when the villain got what they deserved. One has to admit to these base instincts.

 Philip Grözinger seems drawn to this function of storytelling when he, in turn, translates subtle abysses and contradictions into images and motifs. They are colorful enough to pull viewers in, and unsettling enough not to let them go. Again and again, he includes playful elements that show his generous leniency toward those—our—instincts. For his new exhibition, the fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife” provided the impulse. To recap: A fisherman catches an enchanted flounder and lets it go. When his wife finds out, she sends him back to the sea to ask the flounder for a better hut. But it doesn’t stop at the hut. She wants more and more: first a castle, then to be queen, empress, pope—and all of it is granted. But when she finally wants to become God, it is too much. The flounder takes everything back, and the couple ends up again in their old, shabby hut.

 There is a moment in the story that sticks emotionally. The sea has long turned black, the sky nothing but a single threat, and yet the fisherman stands once more on the shore and hesitantly calls his rhyme—Manntje, Manntje, Timpe Te, Buttje, Buttje in the sea— even though he already senses it’s too much this time. Still he calls, because his wife expects it. Grözinger has made this moment the title of his exhibition. Manntje manntje timpe te is the instant in which one calls out even though one already fears the answer, yet still hopes for the opposite.

 If one wants to, this phrase can be read as an allegory for the present: our handling of the climate crisis, in which we quite literally turn the sea against us because we cannot stop taking more and more. Or the growth compulsion of an economy that knows no category of “enough.” Or a technological civilization convinced it can control everything, while sitting in a boat that is already capsizing. But one doesn’t have to read it that way.Grözinger is known for his colorful, playful visual language, located somewhere between Romanticism, Surrealism, the Neue Wilde, and the visual repertoire of retro video games.

 There are many grinning beings—from the fisherman to the currywurst—only the brightest flowers, cowboys with rainbow revolvers, pixel dogs. Everything is painted with energy; and as eclectic as this may sound, it works because Grözinger is ultimately a storyteller. He tells stories across canvases, objects, and spaces. Figures appear, vanish, return. The fish meets us here as a goldfish, there as a flounder, everywhere. His paintings, objects, and installations come from a world with its own mythology, its own physics, even its own weather. And the weather, it must be said, is currently very changeable to stormy.

 For the exhibition, Grözinger has once again expanded his pictorial cosmos. into three dimensions. In addition to the paintings, one finds carefully placed sculptural elements. Among them: a washing machine. It is—perhaps surprisingly—the most poetic object in the entire exhibition. Not only because it can produce waves of water, inside its drum and on its surface, just like the sea in the fairy tale. But because it stands for what remains when all wishes have been granted and ultimately taken back. In the end, the fisherman and his wife must return to their miserable hut. Back to doing the laundry, so to speak.

 Grözinger’s painting will nich so wie ik wol will (“won’t do as I want it to”), which forms the conceptual core of this show, depicts the moment of maximum tension. The sea has reared up, not as a backdrop but as an actor. The waves are no longer waves; they are events of color. Blue, violet, orange —a maelstrom that sends the entire image spinning. The flounder, that greenish‑golden creature, sits atop the wave and looks down with an expression wavering between mockery and pity. And below, at the center of chaos, the fisherman balances in his boat, holding a fishing rod or a lightsaber or a rainbow pistol against the force bearing down on him. At the right edge of the painting, once again, ladders lead into nothingness. One may read them as architectural forms of “higher, faster, further”—as ascension devices without a goal, career ladders without a top. And fishing for the big catch—the flounder, the wish‑giver, the jackpot—can be understood as a metaphor for a dangerous game we all play. Only we don’t call it a game. We call it growth, ambition, making the most of life. And with every wish fulfilled, the sea grows a little darker and the sky a little more threatening. Still we keep calling. Because the alternative would be to sit back down in the shabby house and be content.

 But one notices something in Grözinger’s fishermen and cowboys and creatures that is also crucial for interpreting the story: They don’t actually want all this. They are content. The fisherman would have let the flounder swim away and gone home, but he is under the pressure of his wife to want more. This social pressure is stronger than one’s own contentment. That is perhaps the subtlest and most contemporary point of the fairy tale, especially  in Grözinger’s interpretation. The problem isn’t only greed, but the inability to resist the expectation of having to be greedy.

 It would be easy to dismiss this exhibition as cultural criticism—consumer society, the hubris of wanting ever more. But Grözinger doesn’t moralize. He shows somethingcolorful, inviting, absurd, loving, and sad, so that one might feel caught out but not lectured. His figures are not caricatures. When they balance on their sides or hold on to glowing foam noodles, they reflect us modern humans in all our comic desperation. And watching them, one thinks: yes, that could be me.

 The fairy tale of the fisherman and his wife ends with everything reset to the beginning. Grözinger is kinder than the Brothers Grimm. His exhibition does not end in the shabby hut. It ends with a karaoke machine. As long as we keep singing.

Annekathrin Kohout