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# Every Fresh Start Carries the Last One Inside It - Review Josefine Schulz
- URL: https://www.catapult-platform.art/josefine-schulz-makeover-ortloff-gallery-leipzig/
- Published: 2026-05-05T04:00:39.000Z
- Updated: 2026-05-05T04:00:38.000Z
- Description: Kunstraum Ortloff Leipzig presents Josefine Schulz's Makeover. On identity as process, the glow-up as loop, and overpainting as method. .
- Author: Dominique Catherina Foertig
- Tags: Exhibition

## **Kunstraum Ortloff Presents Josefine Schulz -Makeover in Leipzig**

**Kunstraum Ortloff** presents *Makeover (fall in love again and again)*, a solo exhibition by **Josefine Schulz** with a text by Carolin Kralapp, through May 9, 2026.

The makeover is one of contemporary culture's most persistent formats, not because transformation is actually possible, but because the demand keeps returning. The logic is clean, a before, an after, and a legible distance between them. What Josefine Schulz seems interested in is where that logic starts to hold differently.

---

**Makeover (fall in love again and again)** 

**Artist:**  
Josefine Schulz

**Exhibition:**  
Makeover (fall in love again and again)

**Venue:**  
[ Kunstraum Ortloff ](https://www.ortloff.org/?ref=catapult-platform.art) 

**City:**  
Leipzig, Germany

**Dates:**  
April 23 – May 9, 2026

**Hours:**  
Saturdays 2-6 PM & by appointment

**Address:**  
Jahnallee 73, 04177 Leipzig

**Photography:**  
dotgain.info

**Image Courtesy:**  
Courtesy Kunstraum Ortloff

**Contact:**  
[galerie@ortloff.org](mailto:galerie@ortloff.org)

---

Mirrors appear throughout the exhibition, but they don't quite do what mirrors are supposed to do. Figures look into them and find other faces. Reflections double without resolving. The surface keeps returning something that isn't quite the image the protagonist was looking for, and the paintings hold that discrepancy without explaining it.

> The makeover promises a clean break. Schulz's paintings suggest the break never fully comes — and that this might not be the failure it sounds like.

---

[**Kunstraum Ortloff** ](https://ortloff.org/?ref=catapult-platform.art)is a former residential space in Leipzig-Lindenau, high ceilings, large double-framed windows, connecting rooms that give the exhibition room to breathe and accumulate. 

![Josefine Schulz, detail view, Makeover (fall in love again and again), Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026 — small canvas on blue tile-grid wall depicting a pink compact mirror with curling ribbon handle; two faces side by side inside the round mirror, one with short hair and striped top, one with long dark hair and green top; light blue tile-patterned ground on canvas.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/05/josefine-schulz-makeover-compact-mirror-detail-tile-wall-ortloff.jpg)

****Josefine Schulz**, detail view, **Makeover (fall in love again and again)*, Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026\. Photography: dotgain.info. Courtesy Kunstraum Ortloff.

For Makeover, [**Josefine Schulz**](https://josefineschulz.com/?ref=catapult-platform.art) has extended the work directly onto the architecture, one wall painted entirely in a flat grid of blue squares, turning the gallery into something between a domestic bathroom and a film set, the tiled surface setting conditions for the works installed against and within it, a ground that mirrors the content without underlining it.

The largest painting in the exhibition depicts a group of women along a public restroom counter. Flat, unmodeled figures in vivid color, neon green overalls, a red top, a purple jacket, an orange turtleneck, stand at a tiled sink, phones held loosely, a wavy blue frame enclosing the scene as if mimicking the restroom mirror itself. 

At the top of the canvas, the reflections of their backs appear, while the viewer occupies the position facing them, creating a scene of collective intimacy, the one semi-private space where strangers perform self-adjustment side by side, and where the mirror functions as shared infrastructure.

![ Installation view, Josefine Schulz: Makeover (fall in love again and again), Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026 — left wall: painting of woman peering from behind lavender shower curtain with stuffed rabbit on tub edge; corner wall: monumental canvas with wavy blue frame depicting multiple women in colorful outfits at a public restroom counter, tiled blue floor and pink surface, mirror reflection at top.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/05/josefine-schulz-makeover-installation-bathroom-vanity-ortloff.jpg)

****Josefine Schulz**: **Makeover (fall in love again and again)*, Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026\. Photography: dotgain.info. Courtesy Kunstraum Ortloff.

![Installation view, Josefine Schulz: Makeover (fall in love again and again), Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026 — left: blue tile-grid wall with large pink-magenta wavy-framed canvas, handwritten text and layered architectural motif visible inside frame, wooden shelf below; right wall: painting of figure seen from behind at blue vanity mirror with bulb lights, striped top, pink ground, wine glass.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/05/josefine-schulz-makeover-installation-tile-wall-dressing-table-ortloff.jpg)

****Josefine Schulz:** **Makeover (fall in love again and again)*, Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026\. Photography: dotgain.info. Courtesy Kunstraum Ortloff.

![Josefine Schulz: Makeover (fall in love again and again), Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026 — left wall: monumental canvas with wavy blue frame depicting women at public restroom counter; through doorway: blue tile-grid room with pink-framed painting and small text painting with tulip vase visible in background.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/05/josefine-schulz-makeover-installation-overview-vanity-room-ortloff.jpg)

****Josefine Schulz:** **Makeover (fall in love again and again)*, Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026\. Photography: dotgain.info. Courtesy Kunstraum Ortloff.

On the tiled gallery wall, a small canvas shows a pink compact mirror opening to reveal two faces, not a face and its reflection, but two faces together, side by side, as if the object had declined its designated function. The scale is precise. Against the expanse of blue tile, the painting holds its ground through concentration rather than size.

A third work dominates the adjacent room, a large canvas set within a wavy pink-magenta frame that reads simultaneously as vanity mirror and decorative cartouche. Inside it, handwriting and a faint architectural image, a tower, a castle, coexist with text that has been painted over, partially erased, and overwritten again. 

Earlier states of the picture don't disappear, they remain legible beneath the surface, the way a previous self stays readable through a current one. This is the formal argument the exhibition keeps returning to, revision as method, overpainting as a kind of honesty.

![Installation view, Josefine Schulz: Makeover (fall in love again and again), Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026 — left wall: horizontal painting with blue frame showing woman's portrait with blue hair, handwritten text reading "Makeover / fall in love again and again", pink ground; center: white door with glass pane; right: blue tile-grid wall with small compact mirror painting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/05/josefine-chulz-makeover-installation-portrait-tile-corner-ortloff.jpg)

****Josefine Schulz**: **Makeover (fall in love again and again)*, Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026\. Photography: dotgain.info. Courtesy Kunstraum Ortloff.

![Josefine Schulz: Makeover (fall in love again and again), Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026 — wide Altbau hall with large windows; foreground right wall: horizontal painting with blue frame depicting woman's portrait with dark blue hair, soft pink ground, handwritten text at top; far background: shower curtain painting.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/05/josefine-schulz-makeover-installation-portrait-hall-ortloff-1.jpg)

****Josefine Schulz:** **Makeover (fall in love again and again)*, Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026\. Photography: dotgain.info. Courtesy Kunstraum Ortloff.

The early 2000s films that run through the exhibition's references, Clueless screens at the finissage, have returned with some force in recent years, less as nostalgia than as codes a younger generation is now processing as history rather than autobiography. 

The glow-up, the before-and-after, the makeover video, these formats migrated from cinema to social media without losing their structural logic, and they keep mutating. Schulz doesn't critique that logic so much as inhabit it from within, tracing where it holds and where it quietly doesn't. 

A flip phone appears in one painting, an iPhone, a Stanley Cup, in others, the present and the recent past occupying the same pictorial time without resolving into each other.

![Installation view, Josefine Schulz: Makeover (fall in love again and again), Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026 — full frontal view of blue tile-grid painted wall; left: small compact mirror painting on tile; right: large canvas with pink-magenta wavy frame enclosing layered handwritten text and architectural motif over pale ground, wooden shelf at base.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/05/josefine-schulz-makeover-installation-tile-wall-frontal-ortloff.jpg)

****Josefine Schulz:** **Makeover (fall in love again and again)*, Kunstraum Ortloff, Leipzig, 2026\. Photography: dotgain.info. Courtesy Kunstraum Ortloff.

What revision leaves behind isn't failure, it's the record of every version that came before, still there in the surface, not quite gone.

[**Josefine Schulz on Instagram**](https://www.instagram.com/josefine%5Fschulz/?ref=catapult-platform.art)   
[**Kunstraum Ortloff Instagram**](https://www.instagram.com/kunstraumortloff/?ref=catapult-platform.art) 

**About Catapult**

This is a exhibition review published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond.  
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