Like a film director, Joachim Kupke keeps himself rather in the background. While other artists cover their creations with a thick brushstroke and seal them with curved signatures, Kupke uses an almost neutral ductus and always signs and titles his works modestly on the back. This is quite understandable; after all, with his adaptations, overpaintings, and "corrections," Joachim Kupke turns against the exaggerated fetishization of the original - and in the process creates originals himself. By resurrecting his originals, published en masse in art calendars, magazines, and catalogs, as paintings, the images are returned to original and, above all, original painting. A passive consumption of Kupke's visual traps is not possible. Ironically placed, cryptic quotations appeal to our collective pictorial memory, optical incongruities challenge our imagination. For Joachim Kupke, the main sources of inspiration are catalogs, art calendars, and posters, in other words: mass-communicated incunabula that have become part of our collective memory.