By any standard, the Italian painter Antonio Mancini lived through tumultuous times. He was born in 1852 and died in 1930. In the intervening years Europe experienced the unification of Italy and of Germany, World War I and the rise of communism and fascism.

But mainly Mancini lived through the tumult of being Mancini. This included grinding poverty, mental instability, a personality that swung between extreme timidity and paranoid outrage (vented in long, incoherent letters and stream-of-consciousness journals) and an unusually hectic working method that produced some of the weirdest, most conflicted paintings of the period.

His works tend to be skirmishes of contradictory impulses: academic idealization, gritty realism, bravura society-portrait brushwork and thick, modern-looking impastos slathered and scarred with a palette knife. In some instances it is as if Courbet, Jean-Léon Gérôme and John Singer Sargent — a friend of Mancini’s — have all fallen feverishly to work on the same canvas.

Julian Freyberg was born in 1995 in Mönchengladbach. At an early age, he discovered his passion for painting. He attended Feuervogelart school Feuervogel in Viersen at the age of 8 and learned there various basic techniques of art and painting under the direction of Claudia Fischer.  Julian currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
The special thing about his photographs is the interplay of 'paintings' and 'reality'. In this way, Julian creates unique photographs that are intended to stimulate the viewer to think. He leaves nothing to chance in his paintings. He informs himself in advance about the visions of his clients or the historical background in his free work. In addition, he usually chooses the styling (clothes) and any props, which are needed for one of his elaborate photos.