Künstliche Mythologie

The exhibition ‘Artificial Mythology’ by contemporary artist Du Zhenjun offers a fascinating insight into a world in which the tradition of painting is blended with contemporary illusion of reality. Inspired by the great masters of the Renaissance, Du Zhenjun creates an iconography that masterfully interweaves ancient mythology and contemporary technological fictions. His work, rooted in a classical aesthetic, is distinguished by the introduction of a virtual and artificial dimension that is characteristic of our hyper-connected times. In this universe, mythology is no longer just the founding story of past civilisations, but redefines itself as a contemporary metaphysical fiction. The exhibition ‘Mythology artificielle’ presents itself as an exploration of a dematerialised pantheon, in which classic mythological figures stand alongside the ghosts of a reality recomposed by algorithms and networks. The painter, who appears like an architect of an alternative world, draws on images taken from both history and the dematerialised flow of the internet. The shadow of artificial intelligence hovers over these compositions, in which a dialogue emerges between the past and an uncertain future. This pictorial dialectic gives rise to a new mythology, no longer rooted in the soil of our earthly references, but suspended in a hybrid space between reality and digital illusion. Du Zhenjun’s work ‘Artificial Mythology’ invites us to reflect on the nature of our world at the interface between tangible reality and virtual constructions, as well as on our relationship to images, narratives and the perception of an increasingly elusive reality.