SALZBURG.- In . Corri .. and Door ..., Philip Emde resists the epilogue of a classical retrospective. The term feels too definitive for an oeuvre in which past, present, and possibility do not unfold sequentially, but exist simultaneously. Instead of looking backward, the exhibition bets on simultaneity. Memories, familial origins, artistic developments, and new experiences enter into dialogue with one another, forming a continuous present.
Thus far, this present draws from two epicentres in Emde’s life: First, the . Emdiland .. located in his late father’s former antique shop in Neustadt an der Weinstraße—a place where memories, past spatial installations, left-behind objects, and a former theater stage overlap, now serving as both workshop and studio. Second, there is the . Emdiland .. in his studio in the southern district of Cologne. Emde works in both places; he lives and does not live in both. He is there, and much of what has shaped him is there too: family histories, emotions, memories, paintings, plants, and a multitude of Steiff animals, each carrying its own past within.
One . Emdiland .. forms the origin, the other its continuation. Both function simultaneously as archives and points of departure. What is preserved in one place can be further contemplated, transformed, and reassembled in the other.
His realms are connected by white wooden structures—so-called “gates”—that exist in both locations. As recurring spatial markers, they function less as actual crossings and more as imaginary mediators between Emde’s worlds. They bridge origin and present, as well as the dimensions of truth. They do not do this by dissolving distance, but by enabling a mental and emotional transit between both places. What begins in Neustadt continues in Cologne. What is created in Cologne points back to its origin.
In Salzburg, this principle is expanded for the first time by a walkable corridor, to which the exhibition title already eludes. Derived from the Latin currere, meaning “to run,” the corridor stands for movement between places, memories, and states of being. Unlike the gates, it possesses a clear vector. It points toward direction, development, and the possibility of a narrative unfolding within the space. Whoever enters it becomes part of a shift—flanked by Steiff monkeys clinging to the railings as protective and supportive travel companions.
The Steiff animals are far more than recurring motifs within Emde’s work. Over decades, the artist has amassed an extensive collection and arranged them throughout his studios. His paintings and installations emerge from these figures. Sometimes they sit on shelves, sometimes they appear individually, and sometimes they encounter one another in carefully composed constellations. Elephants, frogs, monkeys, leopards, and crocodiles populate his pictorial world as active characters in a complex, emotional topography.
At times, the animals themselves gaze at paintings; in other works, they become their subject. A shift occurs between the observer and the observed. Reality and staging begin to mirror each other.
Like few other objects, stuffed animals accompany humans through the most vulnerable and earliest phases of their lives. They are held, comforted, forgotten, rediscovered, and passed on. They are material repositories of closeness and touch. Over the years, they absorb the traces of their owners, shaped by hugs, solace, loss, and time. Their surfaces bear memories that elude any form of archiving.
The cycle of animal, stuffed animal, and human illustrates a non-linear arrangement of simultaneities and vitalities that only deliver emotional value when combined. Emde does not show the people to whom these animals once belonged. He shows what is left of them. In an almost anthropological reversal, the animals appear as the actual bearers of human experience, while their previous owners have vanished from direct perception. The figures become projection screens for vulnerability, longing, attachment, and comfort—standing for themselves, yet also for those who shine through them.
Emde continues to pursue this thought in his painting as well. Monkeys like the recurring Jocko, leopards, or crocodiles relate to one another in precise constellations. They embody loneliness, affection, desire, loyalty, loss, or fear. Series such as the “Twins” unfold a narrative about partnership and connection, while the jaguar appears as an observing totem and power animal that accompanies, protects, and reflects upon the events.
Philip Emde’s world of references feeds on pop culture, film, literature, and personal mythology. Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story is particularly present. In that tale, the disappearance of imagination leads to the spread of “The Nothing.” Emde’s works similarly circle the question of which interior spaces open up when memory, fantasy, and reality collide.
Like Michael Ende, Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), or J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan), Emde does not view play as an counter-world to the seriousness of life, but as its very form. His painting preserves childhood not as a memory of a bygone time, but as a faculty that accompanies human beings until the very end: the capacity to wonder, to invent, to forge connections, and to encounter the world anew time and again. His animals do not populate a childish fairytale world. They take the place of humans without replacing them, opening up a space where feelings, relationships, and experiences become visible without needing to be explained. As in play, meaning and direction only emerge in the process. Even the artist himself does not know the outcome. Painting and painter embark together on an adventure whose course remains open, and at the end of which both are transformed. Precisely therein lies the resistance of these works. They counter the desire for ambiguity with a poetic openness, defending play as a creative form of experiencing the world.
His visual language consciously steps back behind a raw and immediate form of representation. Naivety here is not to be understood as a deficiency, but in its original sense as open-mindedness. It describes a state in which perception becomes more direct and the distance between sensation and expression shrinks.
The motif of the shelf plays a central role in Emde’s work. Cabinets, drawers, and shelves have always served as places of order. They structure things, preserve memories, and give form to the fleeting. In Emde’s work, they become more than functional objects. They create pictorial spaces, connect levels, and enable encounters between figures, eras, and generations. Like multidimensional bookshelves, they organize not just objects, but relationships. They provide support without locking things into place. Past and present appear within them not as successive states, but as simultaneous realities.
This concept of time permeates the entire exhibition. Circles, dots, and balls are recurring motifs. Through them, movement becomes visible without ever being completed. Even the punctuation set by Emde follows this principle. The three dots that accompany many of his titles point to something that is being continued.
. Corri and Door .. also remains open on both sides, like a hallway that neither clearly begins nor ends. Clocks run through Emde’s work, pointing to a form of time that eludes linear measurability. Even the motif of the pizza can be read as a playful reinterpretation of the clock. What remains is the circle, not the chronology. Time appears here less as an objective order and more as something constructed—something that can be shifted, superimposed, and reassembled.
Ultimately, the simultaneity of origin, generations, and the present condenses in an intimate video work. It shows Emde’s late grandmother in her house in Neustadt an der Weinstraße. She sits knitting in her living room, crafting a collection of warming socks. Knitting appears as a quiet act of order. From a seemingly endless thread, a protective pattern emerges step by step. In the background, a television documentary about wild boars is playing. It talks about paths in the forest, trails that provide the animals with orientation and safety. At the exact moment the “Leitbache” (the matriarchal alpha sow) is mentioned as the center of the family structure, the grandmother looks up.
It is an inconspicuous moment. And for that very reason, a remarkable one. For a brief instant, both systems seem to correspond: the grandmother’s knitting and the grandson’s painted grids. Both attempt to give form to the fleeting. Both create structures that offer stability without dissolving the complexity of life.
In the end, as the artist himself describes it, his works are like an “abstractly painted fable.” True to the nature of a fable, human experiences are transferred onto animals to make truths visible. Yet Emde simultaneously dissolves the narrative back into color, form, and relationship. . Corri and Door .. unfolds a space in which origin, memory, fantasy, and the present can exist simultaneously. The exhibition shows that boundaries are often less fixed lines than permeable thresholds, and that the attempt to give life form is perhaps more important than the forms themselves.
Elisa Mosch
