The Filters are Overstrained

In The Filters are Overstrained, Yevheniya Fritsche reflects on the power of media to distort perception and blur the line between truth and illusion. Prompted by rising political mistrust and societal anxiety, she questions whether objective truth is still possible in a world shaped by manipulation and fragmented understanding.
Fritsche replaced the lenses of the glasses, symbols of clear vision, with unevenly grown crystals, representing accumulated impressions, filtered knowledge, and subjective experience. One of the temples is broken. While temples usually stabilise the glasses and support clear vision, in her work they stand for the pillars of reality. When these can no longer support the weight of distorted perception, our constructed view of the world begins to collapse, leaving behind only a fragile trace of what might be objective truth.

Yevheniya Fritsche is a Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist based in Koblenz, Germany. She studied Journalism and Linguistics at the University of Sumy and holds a Master of Education in Visual Arts and English from the University of Koblenz.

Yevheniya Fritsche's multidisciplinary practice, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, centres on transformation, a theme shaped by her experience growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine. Influenced by Max Ernst, Duchamp, Beuys, and Polke, she re-examines cultural symbols through an alchemical lens, blending media and testing material limits.
Her work explores dualities—light and darkness, emergence and disappearance, the sacred and mundane—connecting material change with spiritual inquiry. Techniques like dripping, washing, scraping, and layering invite chemical reactions and unpredictability, creating mystical forms that blur painting and sculpture.
As an artist in exile, she carries the weight of war and displacement but believes in transformation as a force of resilience and renewal, personal and collective, intimate and universal.