Anna Clegg's 'Hustlenomics' Exhibition at Schiefe Zähne in Berlin Explores Image Economics

Artist Anna Clegg is presenting a new exhibition titled 'Hustlenomics' at Schiefe Zähne gallery in Berlin. The show features a collection of paintings that investigate how images circulate and function within contemporary visual culture. Clegg's work examines the lifecycle of images, from their creation and dissemination to their role in shaping meaning, memory, and individual identity. The exhibition is organized into three thematic sections that explore self-stylization gestures within social units like peer groups and families. These gestures, initially intended to challenge conventions, often become forms of self-promotion that can be co-opted by the same social systems they sought to escape. Clegg employs a multi-step process involving photography, scanning, staging, and repainting to appropriate and recontextualize images. One series uses discreetly captured party photographs to construct three-dimensional studio scenes where figures are removed from their original recreational settings. Another group incorporates Victorian etching-style drawings that reference imprisonment scenes from children's media, using figures from film and television. A third series subjects interior scenes from cinema, the artist's surroundings, and skate culture imagery to painterly double-exposure techniques. The exhibition demonstrates Clegg's refined focus on how images operate in producing cultural and social capital. By drawing from diverse sources and subjecting them to similar reproduction and consumption processes, Clegg reveals how different cultural figures—from Victorian workhouse orphans to skate video adolescents—become reducible to visual signifiers of archetypal identities. These identities can be adopted and performed to communicate subjective experiences that are easily categorized and consumed. The works consider the forms of labor and workspaces—both spatial and social—involved in image-based visual economies. The exhibition runs until April 18, 2026.