Marik Lechner‘s paintings are mysterious and chaotic, packed with dark impasto color. Their subjects are dark and as troubling as nightmares. Strange creatures - humans, animals and demons - crop out of the thick underbrush of an imagined tropical forest. Angels and ghosts flicker through stark black tree barks and glimmer through layer upon layer of rotting moss. Echoing the Ancient Roman grotto paintings, Lechner's works are also rife with fantastical anatomical contradictions, wild beasts and the heads of humans and monsters. The underlying concept of the grotesque, .i.e. that no detail is redundant within it, is well expressed in these horror vacui landscapes, where all is necessary. Lechner's portraits feature an even more pronounced preoccupation with the grotesque body. They violate the laws of symmetry, clarity and order and they highlight such qualities as alienation, hybridity, vagueness, excess, corporeality, sexuality, the blurring of boundaries and the clashing of different orders. Born in Chernowitz, Ukraine, 1967; lives and works in Berlin and Tel AvivText from The Haifa Museum exhibition catalogue, "Wild Exaggeration - The grotesque body in contemporary art", July 2009 - January 2010.