A frieze is originally a narrow architectural element used to organise walls and façades horizontally. Since the end of the nineteenth century, picture cycles and large-scale wall designs have also been referred to as friezes.
Timur Lukas and Laurentius Sauer are two painters from Augsburg. They work in different media and have developed distinctive styles. Laurentius Sauer deals with myths of masculinity and authority, he shows rearing horses that have just thrown off their riders and juxtaposes them with emblems such as sheriff’s stars or more recent police badges (NYPD). He often works with graffiti, cutting up his canvases and sewing them back together with other materials. Timur Lukas draws his inspiration from antiquity. He is a painter of still lifes who arranges vases and sculptures in space and emphasises their physicality. Sometimes he also draws on the reduced colourfulness of historical vase painting.
The two have recently started sharing a large studio in an industrial wasteland in Augsburg. In spring 2020, Laurentius Sauer and Timur Lukas jointly published an edition for which they coloured a screen print by hand and turned it into a series of unique pieces. These were also labelled ‘Due Two’. For the exhibition at the MEWO Kunsthalle, it quickly became clear that it was not going to be a normal group exhibition juxtaposing the work of one artist on one side and the work of the other on the other. Instead, the two artists developed a joint project, a circumferential frieze that completely covers the walls of the exhibition space and unites the motifs of both artists in a monumental mural.