Spiegel

Katharina Schücke’s drawing practice examines the female figure as it emerges through the intertwined logics of pose, self-staging and the body-obsessed cosmos of bodybuilding. Her point of departure is the mirror selfies shared by athletes on Instagram. From these images, Schücke teases out questions of self-perception and self-empowerment, the shifting of inherited gender codes and the search for affirmation in and through the image. The mirror operates as an accomplice: a surface of control, an instrument for scrutinising appearance, a device for producing reality. With 'Spiegel', GOODBANK presents twelve works that distill this long-standing enquiry. In her drawings Schücke thinks through the line—intuitive, uncorrected, without hierarchy. Executed in ink, they sit in tension with their subject: highly staged self-portraits produced under muscular strain, calibrated through light, selection and repetition. The athletes stage themselves as models of their own achievement, self-determined and at times beyond conventional scripts of femininity. Art historically, the mirror has been bound to the emergence of the self- portrait; paired with the camera, it promises an added degree of control. Schücke’s drawings foreground this otherwise invisible, bracketed element. A faintly surreal register emerges in 'Mirror Without Image' (2025), where the pattern of the leopard print leggings, favoured in the fitness world, overlays the face profile with a feline structure like a stencil. Axial mirroring doubles the tightly cropped portrait, exposing minute deviations. How reliable is the reflected image? The opposing large-scale work likewise reveals itself, on closer inspection, not to be exact reflections. In 'Spiegel' (2026), an ornamental frame drawn with parallel quill underscores the boundary between pictorial space and its reflection. 'Selfie mit Kaffeemaschine' (2026) draws attention to the surrounding space as a silent, incidental extra; here Schücke accentuates the materiality of glass with indigo ink. In 'Alte Spiegel' (2024/2025), the decisive moment is almost withdrawn: a mesh of black lines obscures the posing figure. The motif repeats serially—one arm flexed and raised, the smartphone held before the face. The necessity of capturing the image outweighs even the oxidation of ageing mirrors. A self-portrait on the verge of dissolving into darkness is still preferable to none. In German, the oxidation of a mirror – the gradual deterioration of its reflective backing – is described as the mirror dying or going blind. Schücke’s works hold a mirror to a present calibrated to optimisation and visibility. The pressure of physical norms—as shorthand for performance, desirability and recognition—runs through everyday life and the gym alike, inscribing itself onto every reflective surface. Katharina Schücke (b. 1982 Dresden, DE) lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. She studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt under Tobias Rehberger and is part of the collective HazMatLab. In her drawing practice, she investigates the human figure—most often female—the role of the model and its (self-)staging within contemporary fitness culture. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including at Sonneundsolche, Düsseldorf; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; and basis Frankfurt. She was a fellow of the Artist-in-Residence programme AIR_Frankfurt.