Collection: NIKOLAUS VON WOLFF - Readers

A young woman reads Karl Marx's Capital in the cramped space of a train compartment, while bearded men, almost like reincarnations of the author himself, peer curiously through the window. The scene oscillates between irony and seriousness: here the historical gravity of one of the most influential writings of modernism, there the lightness of the everyday gesture of reading. Von Wolff creates a tension between theory and everyday life, between economic analysis and the individual practice of thinking. But the perfect composition, the precise interplay of glances and reflections, betray the artificial origins. Just as Marx questioned the relationship between value and commodity, von Wolff makes it clear that images too are commodities - products that only simulate authenticity in order to create cultural significance. The work shows us that the question of "value" is no longer just an economic one, but is also negotiated in media and aesthetic terms.

The Readers series develops an overarching discourse from this. With its black-and-white aesthetic reminiscent of the 1980s, it appears like a found archive of urban reading practices, but in reality, it is made up of AI-generated constructions. This deception is its strength: it evokes a collective memory that never existed and invites us to rethink the relationship between image, history, and truth. Reading appears as a metaphor for reflection, an island of consciousness in public space, while the AI images simultaneously make the medium itself their subject. In this way, von Wolff combines literature, philosophy, and visual art in a critical investigation of the present: a time in which authenticity has become an aesthetic effect and in which the question of "capital" also encompasses trust in images.