Julian Irlinger

For his third solo exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Sleepwalkers, Julian Irlinger presents objects, works on paper and a video work titled The Curtain of Time.

Irlinger's video draws on mid-century animation aesthetics and follows the format of traditional animation shorts that used to precede feature films in theaters. The work, commissioned by Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, adopts the technique of cel-animation—where drawings are inked and painted onto transparent celluloid sheets, photographed frame by frame, and compiled into sequences to create the illusion of movement.

Spanning 11 minutes, in The Curtain of Time, Irlinger takes us on a journey through a day in an architecture firm, which unfolds in a single continuous shot: a telephone rings, but nobody picks it up as the staff is asleep, napping on their desks or sleepwalking.

Extending the context of the video, the artist invites exploration of mid-century modern aesthetics through objects and works on paper. The aesthetics recall a modernist past, their recontextualisation opening a space between familiarity and ambiguity.

In his artistic practice, Irlinger approaches past events in sight of future conflicts. Through the excavation and recontextualization of historical fragments, his practice questions the mechanisms of memory and the transmission of history. Drawing on archives and historical aesthetics, his body of work—spanning drawing, film, photography, and sculpture—challenges dominant historical narratives and their cultural representations, as well as the ideological currents that shape them.