Birgit Weyhe's comics are as universal as they are human. They deal with topics such as black empowerment, the living and working conditions of Mozambican contract workers in the GDR or her own family history. Birgit Weyhe's portraits of people from all over the world and from very different cultures are as perceptive as they are free of conventions.

The exhibition highlights how Birgit Weyhe works out patterns of human life that shape identities. There are women who grow strong because they want to live their lives according to their own ideas and encounter resistance in the process. There is the confrontation with wars. The ones that are raging somewhere in the world and turn people into refugees who have to cope with new living conditions and traumas. And there are the two world wars in the 20th century, which uprooted and injured people in Germany in a very similar way, whose scars can still be traced in the generations to come. And there are always people who dare to embark on a new journey because they wish for a better life.

Birgit Weyhe, born in Munich in 1969, spent her childhood in East Africa and only got into comics late in life. She began studying illustration at the HAW Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in 2002. She draws the material for her comics from everyday life. When her daughter was asked to draw a family tree for school, Birgit Weyhe realised how little she knew about her family. She began to research and drew the comic "Im Himmel ist Jahrmarkt". For the Berliner Tagesspiegel, she draws short portraits of people she has met mostly by chance in the series "Lebenslinien". Birgit Weyhe researched her current comic "Rude Girl" because she was accused of cultural appropriation in her comics during a lecture tour of the USA. The fact that they become universal stories also has to do with her way of working. Birgit Weyhe combines text and image in her comics in such a way that more than narration emerges. She creates patterns that seem to stem from different cultural contexts - and which in her more recent comics increasingly turn into abstract structures, such as dark clouds that cover her protagonists. Or she draws metaphors in her comics. Birds are particularly frequent: those cowering on the ground, others plucked, or birds soaring into the air, thus becoming the image of people's emotional world. In this way, she draws narratively dense webs that seem familiar and alien at the same time, with a signature all her own.

Andrea Heinze