Mike OKAY | Smells Like Teen Spirit

with a fragrance composition by Veronika Raupach

Opening: Friday, 25. of September 2026, 7pm
open Friday 3-6pm  
and Saturday 12-3pm

The exhibition Smells Like Teen Spirit documents Mike Okay’s artistic engagement with watercolor painting—and a personal move toward more concrete forms of expression. It is complemented by scent compositions by the artist Veronika Raupach.

Clad in helmets and uniforms, a pair of figures runs, rolls, and wrestles through Mike Okay’s new pictorial worlds. They put on plush-toy masks, play “Giddy-up, horsey” and “Rock, paper, scissors,” ride inline skates, or compete in ping-pong, arm wrestling, and boxing. A combative gesture and static posture contrast with dynamic activity and childlike lightness—and dissolve into a fluid, airy play of color.

These are the artist’s first works ever to show human figures. Previously, urban structures, toys, comic heroes, and cultural codes from his childhood and youth dominated his mostly large-format canvases. In the Toy Stories (2020) series, rough airbrush lines outlined small visual narratives of dolls, cuddly bunnies, and crashed Matchbox cars on homogeneous canvases. With Alle Pudel fliegen hoch (2023), Mike Okay turned painting into a child’s game by cutting up his finished motifs, reassembling them like a sliding puzzle, and painting over them again.

Small details from these earlier works also enrich the scenes in the new large formats: chains, mask-glasses, martini glasses, and above all, droplets. In Rock, Paper, Scissors, they were collaged from canvas fragments. Following their own grid, they almost “dance” across the picture. As silvery shimmering aluminum objects, fifteen of them hang from the ceiling and walls throughout the exhibition, creating a spatial connection between the works on view. Their emphasis is unmistakable.

But are these raindrops? Martini splashes? Or tears? The works themselves provide the answers. In The Duel, the protagonists play arm wrestling on the hood of a “Mercedis,” each casually resting the other arm behind their head. “Too much Emotion?” one figure asks the other, who replies: “Full Speed Devotion!” The call is to surrender to one’s own feelings with full passion; to take joy, sorrow, pain, or overwhelm seriously as sources of true authenticity and to give them space.

Is this the guiding idea of this new series: finding closeness to oneself? Does the weightlifter in Summer Body Loadingexamine his mental strengths and weaknesses in the mirror rather than his muscular power? Do the figures wear their helmets to protect against inner pain rather than external injury? And is the martini glass in Cheers for Fears therefore not meant to numb one’s own fears, but to open them up to the outside world?

In this sense, Mike Okay’s works also function as a response to Nirvana’s anthem for a youth marked by inner turmoil and a sense of not being taken seriously. Yet it is precisely in the early years of life that there is a curiosity, a spirit of departure, and a thirst for adventure that deserve to be heard. It is this very force—this teen spirit—that inspired artist Veronika Raupach to create three scent compositions, presented alongside Mike Okay’s works in the exhibition.

They are provided as scent samples on test strips and accompany the walk through the exhibition. Odors are directly linked in the brain to the limbic system, which is why they can trigger strong emotions and memories. These individual associations enter into correspondence with the visual perception of the paintings. The olfactory art extends the intended inward gaze by enriching the sensory experience of looking at images with another—deeply personal—dimension.

Taken together, Mike Okay’s works allow viewers to trace not only the genesis of the images but also the artist’s engagement with various possibilities of watercolor painting as a process.

Mike Okay ties his approach to self to new artistic forms of expression. He sets aside the airbrush and takes up the brush, replacing indirect application of paint with a method that connects him more directly to the canvas. He applies fluid acrylic ink to horizontally oriented, transparently primed canvases. The colors flow into one another, overlap, and form their own shapes. The gesture remains visible; the process is legible.

Contours are no longer defined by hard outlines but by delicate gradations; saturated colors give way to a soft, almost translucent palette. In a further additive step, the artist adds additional structures and details on top; occasionally, he collages entire canvas fragments from other works. This creates greater pictorial depth and, at the same time, multiple image centers that extend across the entire canvas. The painting unites two compositions in one: the original arrangement and, stretched over it, a polyfocal all-over.

The Duel and Goose Step show fuller pigmentation, superimposed layers of color, and figures placed on top that barely stand out from the background, seeming almost to merge with it. From a distance, they give the impression of meditative color fields; a closer look reveals the actual scene, and up close, the richness of detail in complementary motifs and color play. In these three phases of perception, the artist’s immersive experience is transmitted to the viewers.

In Summer Body Loading and the monumental Close Combat, the figures stand out more strongly from their backgrounds. The focus lies on the depicted scenes. Less obviously than the weightlifter, the boxing match thematizes self-experience: in the ring, Rocky and Rambo—two characters played by the same actor, Sylvester Stallone—face each other. It is as if different social roles, which exist in each of us, are competing here and must be reconciled.

With At a Gallop and Rock, Paper, Scissors, Mike Okay significantly concretizes his watercolor painting. Both works are characterized by a clear, markedly reduced application of color. With its homogeneous background and relatively few details—three chain fragments, several martini glasses on the floor, and an all-over of small droplets—At a Gallopappears almost minimalist within Mike’s pictorial cosmos. At the same time, the bodies diverging in play generate the strongest dynamism.

With helmets, masks, uniforms, wide jackets, trousers, and unisex boots, the identity of the figure pair in all images remains intentionally unresolved. In Rock, Paper, Scissors, Mike Okay pushes the anonymity of his protagonists to the extreme: one of the two figures holds the removed helmet in their hand. Yet the framing is chosen so mischievously that the exposed face remains hidden beyond the canvas. It is a clever device: viewers are invited to identify with the cast of characters—and to enter a game of manifold interpretation.

Thus, in the exhibition Smells Like Teen Spirit, it is not only painting and olfactory art that meet, but above all the visitors themselves.

Exhibition text by Katharina Lorenz, 2026