Icons, originally symbolic representations of religious content, have, anglicized to “icons”, found their way into all areas of our lives.
As advertising icons, icons of contemporary architecture and art or as signs for software on the screens of our computers, icons developed by marketing strategists and the messages they send shape our everyday lives and our environment.
Like their religious predecessors, icons translate complex content and functions into symbols.
In daily use, in daily viewing, the icons replace the underlying content.
The artists participating in the exhibition, Ruprecht Dreher, Peter Freitag, H C Petersen, Oliver Ross and Marco P Schäfer, are concerned with examining and breaking down, deconstructing this equation of symbol and content - and what this means for our perception of the world. 

The material of her work is paper. Two fundamentally different approaches are evident in the works on display:  On the one hand, the recombination or erasure of iconic signs of / from found material, on the other hand, the construction of iconic-looking signs from blank, non-pre-embossed material. 
What both approaches have in common is the deconstruction of the icon as a “similar sign” and thus the detachment from its use as a controlled association. A detachment that allows the viewer to experience the omnipresent iconic imprint of our society of the “iconic turn” by opening up new associative spaces. 
When selecting the positions, emphasis was placed on the comprehensibility of the artistic operations. This means that cuts and layering are not concealed but, on the contrary, are precisely worked out extensions into the space. Consequently, some of the works detach themselves from the wall and transform into three-dimensional objects. 
This formal aspect reinforces the dissolution of the symbolic “icon” by emphasizing the real material.

The exhibition is sponsored by:
Cultural Office City of Düsseldorf