In her painting, Helene Appel reflects the things of everyday life with high precision. Whether it is a piece of meat, lettuce leaves, fishing nets, twigs, plastic bags or puddles, Appel presents her cropped subjects in plan view, on untreated canvas in a realistic scale. If one takes a closer look, though, this attitude reveals its radical nature. Detaching herself completely from the tradition of still life, Appel does not strive to develop a painterly signature, does not emphasize her distinctive ductus. Instead, she carefully seeks an adequate mode of expression for each of her pictorial objects, thus emphasizing their particular physical presence. Despite the realistic representation, Appel's works evoke a sense of a high degree of abstraction. The impression is that of a distanced look that creates a tension between the familiar and the unaccustomed questioning the relationship we have to our environment.

To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, a bum with the keys to a country retreat, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows how to find their way around the silverware. In the 1970s Tom Wolfe located the apex of doubletracking as the art world, but today, it's a cornerstone of the middle classes, and a full-blown commonplace of contemporary life. At root, it's a state of mind born of an ambivalent relationship to privilege, that, when perfected, allows those with financial resources the economic benefits of leaning right, and the cultural benefits of leaning left. It curls around the vocal chords of private school alumni as they drop their consonants, sprays the can of legally sanctioned graffiti on the side of the pop-up container shopping mall, and tones the cores of sweaty executives attending weekly parkour classes, prancing about the concrete furniture of housing estates they do not live on. Comprising essays, fiction and art criticism, this is a merciless, witty satire of the middle classes - a venturesome, intelligent debut which cuts to the very core of our duplicitous lives.