The focal point of Timm Ulrichs’ oeuvre is often the artist himself, not due to narcissism but rather as a consequence of conceptual reflection, as he regards the separation between art and life unthinkable. 

Since the 1960s, Duane Michals has been assembling several photographs into chronological sequences. Often including text elements, his imaginative and sometimes fantastically staged image productions address time and cosmos, dream, spirituality, and death.

The images Fabian Knecht presents in his work Fred spuckt in den Pazifik are prosaic as well as moving: In a hospice in Berlin, Knecht lets the terminally ill Fred spit into a glass in order to empty it again 16 days later over the Pacific. 

The ongoing series Cimetières [Cementaries] by Jean-Olivier Hucleux is exhibited at the Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 and is expanded five years later by Friedhof V from the Ludwig Collection. 

In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy Phlegyas is the ferryman who transports the deceased into the Hades in his bark, across the Styx, the river of the dead. Although this character is only briefly mentioned (VIII / 17-21), the crossing of the river is repeatedly addressed in the visual arts.

In a dark chamber, on a jade-colored papyrus boat, a figure is laid out, a hybrid creature with a human body and an animal’s head. Two wolf-headed figures, equipped with arrows and arches, are placed at the entrance.

Burning on the stake, wrapped up, high in the treetops or fed to the birds: Like a mantra, Matthew Day Jackson stages his death year after year, always according to a different funeral rite.

Using simple black lines, Walter Dahn depicts a figure who tears its mouth open with both hands. The view into the gorge reveals a skull from which the figure tries to liberate itself.