The series began in 2021, when I found on the street four beautiful frames in perfect condition, each carrying one of the Chinese Hanzi or Japanese Kanji for the four seasons: Spring 春, Summer 夏, Autumn 秋, Winter 冬. Initially, for how beautiful I found the descriptive Chinese and Japanese language, I did not really care about the symbols themselves, and I thought I could simply use the frames for some of my originals. So I flipped the paper, and there I got the inspiration, the eureka, the epiphany: everything became the opposite. I used colours inspired, for instance, by autumn for the kanji of summer, and that is how I got the colours used inside. Since it was flipped, I could only see the symbol as if it were mirrored, and that was perfect. I just retraced it, spelled the name of the season backwards, and created the composition for the originals. I then copied each sign using what I felt to be its color, and inside those frames I placed four of my older original works: one from 2017, two from 2018, and one from 2019.

gnilhürF is the name of this artwork, the mirrored and reversed form of Frühling, the German word for spring. Inside this piece there are three drawings. At the center there is a creepy monster mermaid, somehow inspired by the aquatic creature-world of Guillermo del Toro, and this is actually the first design I ever thought of when I wanted to produce my first tattoo book. We are talking specifically about December 3rd, 2016, which makes it one of the earliest ideas ever regarding the world of tattoos.

Around it swim two koi, conceived as symbols of yin and yang, of opposite forces moving in balance, tension, and continuity. These two koi were produced on September 30th, 2017, and they mark one of my first attempts in MK23 style, before that language reached the more definitive form it would take in 2018. In that sense, this piece is also a document of becoming. It holds the moment before the language fully knew itself, when the style was still emerging, mutating.

That is why gnilhürF fits this work so well. Spring is the season of beginning, but not in an innocent way. It is not just flowers and softness. It is eruption, return, mutation, the moment when what was buried starts pushing upward again. This work carries exactly that energy. It belongs to a time in which a new artistic language was germinating inside me, and also to the period in which a new life in Berlin was taking shape. Like spring, that phase was a mixture of uncertainty and force, something not yet complete, but already impossible to stop.

The central creature feels almost like a birth from dark water, something half dream, half nightmare, something still forming. The koi around it bring movement, polarity, and circulation, as if the whole composition were breathing through opposites. Together, the three figures create an image of emergence: a world not yet stable, but already alive.