Sabian Baumann’s large pencil drawings are detailed, richly laden with symbols. There is a formal continuation from one drawing to the next, making them part of an endless story. In dreamlike, surreal contexts, they not only raise questions about the social and the political, but also about the physical and the emotional.

The peace sign appears again and again: in the work Road Map for Peace on Wheels at Night, it is explained in an almost textbook-like way in flag semaphore, surfacing as graffiti on a brick wall, appearing in the abstract spokes of a bicycle wheel, and in a further element of the drawing the individual lines of the symbol irregularly oscillate around the center point and form the transition to window cross bars. This in turn opens views of the private and treats in the broadest sense borders between inside and outside, the private and the political. Against the brick wall a wagonwheel loses its spokes and thus also becomes a peace symbol, but more than that, this wheel in its old-fashioned appearance contributes to an anachronism that stands for the parallel worlds that are combined in Baumann’s images.