Manor Grunewald, "Re-Painting Class Studio" 2025, all images © the artist
In the exhibition “Timeline Samples” at Berthold Pott Gallery in Cologne, Belgian artist Manor Grunewald revisits his own painterly archive, reconfiguring earlier works through processes of sampling, reproduction, and self-referencing. By integrating techniques from both amateur painting manuals and digital printing technologies, his practice interrogates the circulation of visual knowledge and the construction of artistic authorship — turning painting into a recursive, self-referencing system. In this conversation, Grunewald reflects on how the studio informs his decisions in exhibition-making, how intuition and iteration shape his process, and how the boundaries between professional and pedagogical image economies begin to dissolve.
Anna-Lena Werner: What is the theme of your exhibition “Timeline Samples” at Berthold Pott Gallery?
Manor Grunewald: For years, I worked with references and samples from other artists or from amateur painting books. I have hundreds of these books, including a collection of eclectic sources: historical art references, amateur watercolor and oil painting, as well as other DIY books. I started this, because I doubted my own painterly practice. All my paintings became paintings about paintings. With this show I tried to instead reference my own work from up to 15 years ago, to see how older and newer works interact with each other, literally. The newer works all belong to a series that is called “Repainting class” – a painting class for myself.
ALW: There’s almost a pedagogical gesture in that process — what did you learn in that “Repainting class”?
MG: Educating myself through the paintings and the amateur books gave me back the pleasure of painting itself – the process. I’m transferring my studio practice from Ghent into the gallery space in Cologne, where I’m testing how older and newer works come together.
ALW: Are the newer works paintings or, as much of your previous work, graphic prints?
MG: Most of the new paintings are oil paintings layered between UV prints. In the studio, I have a vertical UV-wall paint printer, which I use to print photocopies from the books in my archive. I copy pages, sort them into category boxes, such as fruit or studio paintings, trees or techniques. In a second layer, I add a color that already existed somewhere in the copies. I apply a layer of oil paint, then I print on top of it and I paint over it again.
"TIMELINE SAMPLES," Berthold Pott Gallery Cologne 2025
ALW: The exhibition’s title “Timeline Samples” seems to have a double meaning, both referencing the development of your painterly practice and the way the show is installed?
MG: The title actually refers to horizontal timelines found in encyclopedia books. There are usually small images that pop up along the line. Similarly, the paintings in the space at Berthold Pott Gallery are aligned horizontally from the top of the frame. The paintings look as if they’re attached to a clothesline…
ALW: Meanwhile, other groups of paintings are installed more linearly, forming the shape of a wave. You assembled the works in groups – did you do this according to their colors?
MG: I brought around 70 works to the gallery – we selected around 45 works in the space. I try to make the same decisions that I would make in the studio. That's why the paintings were installed along a yellow, red and a blue-toned wall.
ALW: Is there a work in the show that was decisive for the rest?
MG: There's one small painting showing an etching of Rembrandt in his studio. I photocopied it four times over itself, as if it were a sequence – a timeline or a wallpaper. It’s a work about painting.
"Re-Painting Class Studio - Rembrandt Foursome," "Timeline Samples" at Berthold Pott Gallery Cologne, 2025
ALW: Many of your works address the handcraft of making art – painting, cutting, priming – and reflect these practices through other media such as sculptural or graphic approaches. Artists’ tools – a cutter, a color palette, a brush – also become motifs or objects in exhibition spaces. What interests you about this cross-referencing between artistic handcrafts?
MG: It came to me in a time when I was making large-scale abstract paintings, and people asked me about the process. It became a practical joke – answering with insight into another studio, not mine. I used images from studios photographed for amateur painting manuals or historical books; translating these images of techniques in paintings or other media.
ALW: By contrasting amateur manuals with your own studio process, your work touches on the hierarchies of artistic labor. Is this tension something you’re intentionally probing?
MG: For me, this translation questions the construct of what makes an artist “professional” or “amateur.” What qualifies someone? Harder work? More research? More knowledge? Or is it innocence, intuitiveness?
Studio Archive, Manor Grunewald
ALW: On the exhibition invitation for “Timeline Samples” you show a hand holding a brush – a recurring motif in many of your previous works. From an art historical perspective, these gestures have a long tradition of confirming the artist’s authorship and creative power. Has this context influenced how you use the motif of the hand?
MG: It’s less about the hand itself, and more about my obsession with close-ups of people doing things with their hands. In educational and practical resources – like DIY books or YouTube tutorials – you will always need to see the hands. Otherwise, you don't understand how people are doing something.
ALW: For the past six years, you’ve run STEAMY WINDOWS – a dumpling restaurant in Ghent. Have you ever incorporated the aesthetics of cooking – such as cookbooks or cooking tutorials?
MG: Before I had the restaurant, I made like a series called “Rennie”, like the stomach-acid medication – to help digest better. I used this metaphor to reference the digestion an image: how an image appears or disappears. For that series, I used photocopies from an old-fashioned cookbook – full of greasy dishes. Because the photographs were old, the image of, say, a cheese became an abstract, organic substance – no longer resembling food, more like marble. I blew them up in scale, added them to aluminum frames, and stretched white cotton T-shirt cloth over the image, as if it had faded from too much sun exposure.
"Random image composition"
ALW: Do you see your practice as part of the context of appropriation art?
MG: I think it’s hard not to talk about appropriation art within my practice, as it questions the relevance of the original image and the outcome as another artwork. My work is not the end point of this discussion, though. This could be continued into, say, the copy of the copy. It’s the way that we process information today – especially on social media. Original information circulates and lives its own life.
ALW: Do you work intuitively or conceptually?
MG: It’s both, actually. I think the work itself develops intuitively, often emerging from a small idea. But when it comes to exhibition scenography – which I enjoy to develop with architects, like my friend Theo De Meyer – it becomes conceptual.
ALW: Shelves have often been part of the scenography in your past exhibitions. What do they represent to you? Are they recreations of a studio settings or more of an archive?
MG: I like to refer to the shelves as my “external hard disks” – a database, but in physical form. Or maybe an insight into my brain – how I try to structure ideas.
Above: De Garage Mechelen, Installation View, 2017; Below: "Goods Between Floors" - Installation View 2019, Scenogreaphy: Theo De Meyer, all images © Manor Grunewald