"IMMERFORT. Humans as relationships" presents itself as a painterly commitment to humanity and leaves the impression of a visual plea that could not be more impressive: Human being, stay in relationship (!) - with yourself, your fellow human beings and the environment, seems to be the young artist's invitation to us viewers.

Emanuel Heim's oeuvre on display at the Galerie im Theater Rüsselsheim comprises 50 works in oil on canvas, which were produced between 2019 and 2022. Heim creates the majority of his works in large formats (over one metre). Heim is characterised by his strikingly bold use of colour and the confident gestural style with which he operates on the floating border between expressively figurative or natural representations and the derailment of figuration towards abstract spatial contexts, surfaces and forms.

Heim's motifs focus on human beings, how they struggle for community in their search for themselves and how they locate themselves in a world that is just as connected to nature as it is to architectural scenery or geometric forms and artefacts. The painterly and motivic development that Heim underwent is striking: while the works from around 2020 and earlier were mostly portraits that flowed onto the picture ground in an almost expressionist tradition with wild strokes and bright colours (e.g. "In der Familie", "In der Wüste II", "Im Kopf I"), the portraits from 2020 and into 2021 are increasingly in motion. Using a generous palette knife and painting technique, some facial features and parts dissolve (e.g. "Im Feuer", "Harlekin", "Porträt eines Unbekannten"), figures are found in imaginative to nature-bound environmental contexts (e.g. "Der weiße Strand", "Die Suche", "Die Werkstatt", "Nachts im Atelier"), figure and ground, content and form, movement and stillness seem to flow into one another, and Heim consistently continues this process.

The turning point in his oeuvre in this respect appears to be the work "Icarus". Just as Icarus flew too high with the wings of Daedalus and the wax with which the feathers of the wings were attached melted in the heat of the sun, causing Icarus to fall into the sea, Heim exposes human beings to a similar process of becoming and allows them to merge into light, shapes, colours, structures, emotions and formations. In other words, with "Icarus" Heim realises the dissolving state of being of the human being, that state which, through movement, comes to disembodiment and thus into a superordinate flow, until it finally lives on as pure vibration in the whole of its surrounding world, which means that although the absence of the human being is evident in Heim's repertoire, it becomes all the more present precisely because of this absence of the human being as a guiding pictorial motif.

Particularly in the works from the year 2022 (e.g. "Die Ankunft", "Im Austausch", "Der Strauß") with harbingers from the year 2021 (e.g. "Die Stromschnelle", "Der Übergang", "Der Eingriff"), we recognise in his pictures the compositionally skilfully staged centre around which a kind of pull develops through forms, geometries, patterns and perspective, which involuntarily draws us in as viewers and locates our, in the truest sense of the word, "access to the picture" in Heim's colourful world and narrative subtlety. In this way, we become part of the narrative that unfolds in the picture and part of the relationship that Heim's pictures establish.

Ultimately, it is logical that the hanging of the works is orientated towards Heim's development process: in the foyer on the right, the exhibition tour begins with the theme of "Human Being-Self" and shows individual portraits in which the human being is placed in a specific environment (see title) as a sentient being in an expressive manner and with a pronounced style.

In the right-hand tier - to complete the tour in the correct order - human beings as social beings are addressed under the subtitle "Towards you", as they enter into relationships and - formally represented by the dissolution of facial features - dissolve part of themselves in favour of dialogue with others.

The turning point described above (Icarus) occurs in the middle tier under the spatial concept "Free for us". Here are the exhibits that pave the way for the liberation of human beings from their, perhaps narcissistic, selves and slowly make them part of the whole, freeing them from their self-contained world and placing them in relation to everything and everyone.

In the tier on the left under the subtitle "Mittendrin bewegt", we as viewers are invited to immerse ourselves in the flow of shapes, colours, perspectives and surfaces in order to find ourselves in a sensual experience in the midst of Heim's imaginative world.

This leads us in the foyer on the left to "Insights and Views", which, through the "spatial, multi-layered depth effect between the naturally grown and the man-made" (Michael Sutter, 2022), gives an atmospheric idea of man in his fully embedded and sheltered existence in the world.