Some galleries ask you to keep your distance. Marniok Art Gallery would rather you came closer.
Founded by Julia Marniok in the old town of Hochheim am Main, it grew out of a mobile concept that took art to where people live and work, and its walls still feel more like a living room than a white cube. At Discovery Art Fair, the gallery brings three painters with a shared faith in the surface of a painting and three very different ways of keeping it, which is exactly why the booth is worth the visit.
Isabelle Breitkopf: Color at Full Volume
Isabelle Breitkopf’s motto is “Es muss knallen,” and the paintings keep the promise. Breitkopf, born in France and based in Mainz, works with acrylics using rags, sponges, spatulas, rollers, and everyday objects, pushing and pulling the paint until it stands thick and carries every gesture. The energy sits close to action painting: each canvas records its own making, and the making was clearly a pleasure. The contrasts are flamboyant, the abstraction complete, yet each painting pulls you in. Playful titles, such as Eiersalat, Flohzirkus, Schmackofatz, explain almost nothing and awaken imagination. Her paintings are made to spark joy and conversation, leaving every viewer free to find their own way in.
Isabelle Breitkopf
Thorsten Poersch: Portraits on Borrowed Time
Thorsten Poersch grew up in the Ruhr, among collieries, coal dust and rusting steel, and his materials remember it: charcoal, ash, sand, lime, paper and pigment, layered until the ground cracks like an old wall. Onto these weathered surfaces he sets faces built from fine dots. If you step back, a portrait appears; if you step closer, it dissolves into points and fissures. The works catch glimpses of things already passing, beauty, youth, happiness, tactile enough to touch and too ethereal to hold. They are mementos in a contemporary sense, urging us to live in the moment and cherish what has been.
Thorsten Poersch
Susanne Kirsch: The Charm of the Imperfect
Susanne Kirsch, born in Frankfurt in 1966 and based in Rodenbach, paints with acrylic, pigment, charcoal, oil pastel and filler, applied with brushes, spatulas and, when the canvas demands it, a broom. Since 2017, she has studied colour painting with Jerry Zeniuk, and it shows in the balance of her work. Some canvases are dense and saturated; others leave wide fields open and let a single line do the talking. Abstract or associative, her paintings are harmonious in colour and restless in movement, bold or gentle, thick or thin. Kirsch’s approach is contemporary, but its roots lie unmistakably in modernist abstraction at its best.
Susanne Kirsch
Marniok Art Gallery at Discovery Art Fair Frankfurt
Isabelle Breitkopf, Thorsten Poersch and Susanne Kirsch will be presented by Marniok Art Gallery at Discovery Art Fair Frankfurt, from October 29 to November 1, 2026. Come close, linger, and find the painting that answers back.
Isabelle Breitkopf works at Marniok Gallery