Like a pictorial encyclopedia, the exhibition catalog on the artist duo de Gruyter & Thys, Das Wunder des Lebens, contains over 400 drawings that show all the modern world has to offer—from maps and city views to cars and airplanes. However, unlike conventional pictorial dictionaries, there is no symbolic system. We see laundry bags and paint buckets as well as a nun and a man with a hat in front of a double window, a shy animal with a thick fur and breakfast on a Victorian table. Juxtapositions are normalized, and normality becomes a farce. E verything is exposed to everyone; everything becomes equal. Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys have been working together since the end of the 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects, and videos playing with notions of the banal are steeped in black humor, critical (self)-reflection and overlapping reality, fiction and suppressed history. Upcoming exhibition at MCA Chicago, 2015.