Melanie Siegel's paintings are about the modern world as a habitat constructed by man. The artist is particularly interested in the contrast between the natural and the artificial, the pastoral and the utilitarian, the organic and the constructed.

The pictorial motifs are primarily borrowed from reality. To be more precise: Melanie Siegel "collects" visual impressions from her immediate surroundings. However, the individual recognisable elements - a house, a park bench, a tennis court - are put together like a puzzle and changed so that each picture is an artificial construct. The final composition is decided during the painting process.

The viewer quickly notices that one element is missing from all the paintings: the human being. Melanie Siegel's world is quiet and slightly unsettling. The sense of immobility is underlined by the precise and geometrically arranged compositions. These "straight lines" and the "right angles" suggest the human presence and how it has imprinted itself in nature.

It is through painting that the artist makes an "image of the world". For Melanie Siegel painting is also a reflection of the world. In her paintings she raises questions about our modern society. There is the longing for the natural space and the unspoiled landscape. On the other hand, there is our reality, which is permeated by practical thinking and domesticated interventions in nature resulting in an atmosphere of structured austerity.

What is man's relationship to his self-created reality, to the construction of reality? Melanie Siegel raises the ever-present question what kind of world we have built for ourselves and what kind of world we want to build for ourselves in the future.