DRESDEN.- With “In the Face of Humanity – Sławomir Elsner/Albrecht Dürer” (23 May to 30 August 2026), the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister is devoting a tightly focused show to Sławomir Elsner. On view in the Semper-Kabinett are eight new compositions created by Elsner over a period of several months and relating to works by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the most important artist of the German Renaissance.

Born in 1976 in Poland and today based in Berlin, Elsner frequently starts from paintings by earlier masters, which he transposes into drawing. These are the same size as the original and characterised by extremely fine hatching in coloured pencil. The overlapping, meticulously drawn lines create shimmering concentrations of colour that possess both lightness and luminous depth. Seen close-up, they appear abstract; only from a distance can we make out forms and figures.

At the centre of the presentation is “The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin” (1495/96), an early work by Dürer from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister collection in Dresden. It consists of seven panel paintings arranged in a U-shape around a central field, which was originally occupied by the figure of the grieving Virgin. Elsner has reinterpreted this representation of the “Virgin Mary as the Mother of Sorrows” (today housed in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich) in the form of a drawing, with which he provides the Dresden work with its missing fragment. Unlike in the case of a reconstruction, the juxtaposition of Dürer’s panels and Elsner’s drawing results in a captivating and dynamic relationship. Elsner’s palette deliberately contrasts with Dürer’s earth tones. His Virgin has a brighter, almost radiant hue. She is also translated into a kind of floating state and thus symbolically overcomes earthly suffering.

Other drawings by Elsner featured in the cabinet exhibition are based on Dürer’s large-format panels of “Adam” and “Eve” in the Prado in Madrid, the “Virgin in Prayer” in the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Dürer’s famous self-portraits in the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Elsner’s attention is thereby directed at the human individual at the moment of realization and the experience of pain. Taking up from Dürer, his images navigate the tension between guilt and suffering, body and mind, knowledge and the hope for redemption. They differ clearly in appearance from the works of the Renaissance master: their lines trace no forms, but generate colour harmonies through their multiplicity. They eschew details and allow motifs to emerge only indistinctly before vanishing again. Sławomir Elsner’s drawn paintings appear out of focus and for this very reason serve to hone our gaze.