The work consists of a wooden panel into whichplants and animals, among them a grey heron, havebeen pressed using an innovative process. It belongsto Julius von Bismarck's series titled OOOSB, whichpresses animals, plants and vestiges of civilizationinto a mass of wood shavings using heavy industrialcompression techniques. The artist presses worlds inwhich the history of the material merges with that ofthe pictorial worlds into the panels. The imagery hasoften been based on ideas, experiences, or dreamsby the artist.

OOOSB is a play on the acronym of Oriented StrandBoard, OSB, a cheap building material, and the post-hu-manist concept of object-orientated ontology, OOO.OOO describes humans, non-humans and immaterialconstructs, for instance concepts, as objects that areonly partially perceptible due to the limits of percep-tion. The underlying hypothesis that every object hasits own reality, independent of humans, allows for aconception of existence in which human supremacyis precarious.

A large-scale work executed in acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas, Who are the Two Liberated Femmes Running the Beach? is part of a series of works by Simon Fujiwara recreating iconic canons of art history through the depiction of Who the Bær.

Fujiwara's work draws on Pablo Picasso's 1922 painting Two Women Running on The Beach. The composition depicts two figures, both with the characteristic features of Who. They're characteristic long tongue, dripping with honey that splashes around them, in their hands objects that resemble smart phones. Caught in mid-action, the figures have a dynamic formal quality that echoes the kind of frenzy represented by the figures' absorption with their phones.

Fujiwara's source, Two Women Running on The Beach, dates to Picasso's so-called neoclassical period which developed in response to a visit to Italy in 1917 after which the artist adopted a classicizing formal vocabulary, part of a trend in 1920s painting, the so-called “return to order." At this time, artists such as Picasso began to negotiate a path from pre-war artistic developments, like analytical cubism, towards practices that eschewed abstraction. Greatly enlarged, Picasso's miniature painting was used for the curtain of the ballet production Le Train Bleu which had the theme “games on the beach.” Picasso produced neoclassical works from around 1917 until 1925.

Ostende by Ann Veronika Janssens comprises two layers: the front side of the panel is hammered glass, fixed onto a layer of glass originally produced for an iconic architectural project from the 1970s in Brussels.

As one moves around the work, each hammered section of the glass reflects the light at different angles, creating variant shapes. This second glass is distinguished by its warm amber reflective tint, achieved through a special coating developed for architectural use. Surprisingly, even without the intervention of a dichroic filter, the combination of these two glass types generates luminous gradations that shift with the light, transforming the work’s appearance depending on the surrounding conditions.

The rear glass panel was produced for the occasion of the restoration of Immeuble GBR, a large office building constructed between 1967 and 1970 by architects Constantin Brodski and Marcel Lambrichs in Belgium. A major example of the functionalist architecture of those years, in 1980 it was included by New York's MoMA in its list of 200 iconic buildings of modern architecture between 1960 and 1980.

The work is a kinetic sculpture using film. Looped around four metal rollers—on all four sides just inside the frame—and lit from behind by a light box, colored film stock produces a continuously changing composition. The colors were produced by filming color filters. Vertical and horizontal strips of film are in constant movement, producing a landscape of cascading red shades.

The work is related to Barba's series of still sculptural works made from film stock, Weavers, as well as more generally highlighting the role of artful editing of still and moving pictures in the artist's filmic works. The changing pattern of suggest all these instances producing of light, color, image and sound in Rosa Barba's practice.

The title refers to the Dictionary of Colour Standards published in Great Britain in 1936 by the British Colour Council with an intention to standardize colors across all color-using industries in the British Empire.

Rafa Silvares's Luna depicts four tin cans placed on a shiny, corrugated iron surface. The aerial view point and regular distribution of the tin cans endows the painting with an aura of harmony. Within the open tin cans the viewer glimpses at rich shades of color: navy blue, sun yellow, blood red, and spring green.

With Luna, Silvares continues his exploration of the interplay between vibrant, saturated colors and the cold, shiny texture peculiar to metals. Silvares renders the polished metal of his industrial subjects with meticulous care, emphasizing both precisionist clarity and the inherent elegance of their abstract forms. Triangles, rectangles, narrow black intervals, and gradations of gray coalesce to suggest luminous, silvery surfaces of restrained allure.

In Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's new series of paintings two aspects of his practice are joined: on the one hand, the work recalls the delicate wall drawings that incorporate organic elements; on the other, the fluidity of their geometric pattern takes its linear shapes from the series Lichtzwang, an early conceptual body of work executed on graph paper.

The motif is based on a sequence of marks applied in a pattern of self-imposed rules. The individual marks recall the angular shapes created by following the lines set by the graph paper Steegmann Mangrané uses for his isometric drawings. Here too the formal language of geometric shapes is seen to invoke organic developments, such as growth or wilting, as well as movement, such as vines animated by the wind or floating in water.

Apart from the iconographic reference to forms found in nature, the analogy suggested by the title–"Cobra/Cipó" translates as "Serpent/Vine"–alludes to the artist's practice of exploring forms–be they natural, organic or human-made–as part of a totality, highlighting the arbitrariness of differentiating between life forms and their respective existences.

Executed in acrylic on canvas, Untitled XLI was produced shortly after Merikokeb Berhanu relocated from Ethiopia to the United States.

The painting combines abstract and representational elements, forging a distinct formal vocabulary in viibrant colors. The biomorphic imagery evokes associations with life: Rounded shapes invoke cells, buds, seed pods, or embryonic life, suggesting processes of germination, growth, flowering, and witherinh – underlying themes that are more intuited than stated.

Following her relocation to the United States, her practice evolved in response to the encounter with a consumer-driven culture and an increasing ecological awareness, articulated through the adoption of more vibrant, fluorescent, and overtly synthetic color palettes.

A viewer of Ryan Gander’s Idea machine first encounters a brass plate, installed flush with the wall. A button and a narrow horizontal slot below suggest a ticket machine. The work is intended to be touched: pressing on the button, a small white ticket stub with a short, printed text is produced. The work holds 2000 untouched ideas for artworks by Gander.

Gander has long collected spontaneous ideas, keeping a large pin wall in his studio. Producing them at such speed that giving them away is preferable to feeling the burden of holding onto them and realizing that he can never execute all the ideas, Gander's work is both an act of generosity and an acknowledgement of his own mortality.

The notion of giving away ideas for art works highlights Gander's conceptual approach to the production of art. Questioning common ideas about originality and copyright, and, in making it a machine, gently poking fun at traditional ideas about how an artist creates.

The work is from a series giving Lee Bae's painted Brushstrokes a three-dimensional form. Cast in bronze, the sculpture nonetheless captures the fluidity and the texture of his ink-wash paintings.

With his sculptural work, Lee Bae makes manifest the long simultaneity of one-, two- and three-dimensional associations inherent in his painterly practice: His brushwork not only unfolds on a flat, two-dimensional surface, the works also conjure a three-dimensional space through twists and swerves.

At the same time, the structure of the work resembles assemblies of large charred wooden logs, the deep relief of the surface recalling woodgrain. Charcoal plays an important role in Lee Bae's practice. Used to create his paintings, drawings and the mosaic-like arrangements of his Issu du feu series, it also has a conceptual relevance. To Lee Bae, charcoal represents a condensation of time; immortalizing the life of a tree, it embodies concepts of renewal, circularity and the rhythms of nature, all of which are central to his artistic approach.

Lee Bae started a new series titled Brushstroke around 2020. The most apparent feature of this series is the fact that, once Lee starts, he can hardly hesitate or change the movement of his brush. In this sense, Lee moves into a realm that beholds the essence of East Asian ink-wash painting and calligraphy which are practices in which how an artist sets the brush to paper and wields the brush are of paramount importance. Brushwork and the shades of ink set the tone for the whole piece.

Charcoal has unique meanings in Korean tradition. It is believed that charcoal can dehumidify houses and ward off evil forces. When the first full moon of the lunar calendar rises, people would perform the ritual of “burning the moon house”, setting ablaze a sacred moon structure built up of pine branches. The charcoal carbonized by the burning of pine wood is considered a purifying substance with spiritual implications.

Relatively inexpensive, the medium of charcoal made it possible for Lee Bae to explore various aspects of its materiality. He no longer felt displaced or uprooted when painting with charcoal. In his artistic practice, he found a way to connect with his cultural root. In this world of black and white, certain themes of Lee Bae’s past re-emerged, including charcoal ink, calligraphy, and his own childhood.

—excerpted from an essay by curator and art critic Fei Dawei, 2022

The work consists of a silk panel in a white maple wood frame. The square image shows a progression of colors. The transitions between the different colors appear seamless. There is a slight sheen to the silk as it catches the light. Looking at the works, one begins to see the colors shimmer and glow, as if their intensity were continuously changing.

The dye process has its roots in the artist's investigation and appropriation of traditional techniques of textile production often used for religious or ritualistic purposes but unlike his earlier patola or batik series they no longer show the iconographic traces of their sources. There is a palpable tension between the new work's restraint and its hypnotic lushness created by the combination of apparently simple means and the complexity of their creation, both the extensive references to the artist's project of investigating historical and cultural phenomena and the more immediate curiosity of how the seamless color modulations are created.

Jac Leirner’s installation Copper Light Zig Zag is a wall-mounted abstract sculpture that takes on a rectangular, painting-like format. A zigzagging copper wire curves across the surface, with its final downward segment extended as it connects to the socket.

The piece exemplifies several of Leirner’s characteristic strategies, including accumulation, repetition, and the exploration of relationships between materials and systems. An extended length of zigzagging copper wire channels electricity to illuminate a single bulb, transforming the trajectory of the electrical current into a sculptural form.

A first version of Little Light from 2005 is held in the collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Combining oil, charcoal and spray paint on linen, with Elevate above the madness Thomias Radin, at first sight, collapses form and meaning into materiality and technique. As though the joy of skill itself was enshrined, the handmade frame tenderly holds the canvas like an altarpiece.

As in many of Radin’s works, there are parts of the canvas that are unprimed and unpainted, and these blanks fall in-between collage-like scenes depicting a dark sea beneath a low horizon. Leaving behind a horizontal line at the painting’s core, the sketch of a delicate ankle curving into an abruptly bent hip bone drawn onto the bare canvas contrasts the detailed figuration of a winged dark torso adorned with ivory feathers and black cornrows. A pale rose shimmer spins through the work, accompanied by tiny brushstrokes reminiscent of petals carried by an early spring breeze. As the viewer’s gaze dives deeper into the depicted cloud formations, the titular elevation is performed by their eyes. The act of looking itself, enchanted by the works’s ethereal aura, bears gentle ascension.

Exhibitions

Thomias Radin, Solo Presentation, Artissima, Turin (October 30 – November 2, 2025)

KA Spirit I, 2023, is a hand-carved oak wood drum with mahogany stain, mirrored glass tiles, and marble base.

The sculpture is decorated with two winged figures who are bending, perhaps bowing or dancing, towards the center of the drum. They are lithe and lean, presenting androgynous features in a style reminiscent of Minoan wall paintings. The top of the drum is decorated in an intricate geometric design. Two columns of mirrored tiles run through the central face of the work, accompanied by applique tiles on its left and right. The back of the sculpture feature three large cavities, which provide the deep percussive sound when used as a musical instrument. The work is playable and sculptures in this series have at times been activated by Radin’s uncles as part of the artist’s performances.

Both the carving and the playing of drums have a wider significance in the cultures of Guadeloupe, where they have deep-rooted political associations: the characteristic music of gwo ka was an act of remembrance and resistance for the enslaved population. The titles of the sculptures Hidden in Plain Sight (Esther Schipper 2024) are derived from the ancient Egyptian concept of "ka", a principal aspect of the soul of a human or divine being. In ancient Egypt, ka statues were believed to have acted as surrogates for the deceased, housing their spirit and providing a vessel to which their descendants could make offerings. Radin's work thus draws on the transformative power of movement for both body and spirit.

Exhibitions

Thomias Radin, Trouver son monde, le19M, Paris (September 17 – December 14, 2025)

Thomias Radin, Old Soul – New Soul, Esther Schipper, Seoul (November 8 – December 14, 2024)

Thomias Radin, Rhizome: Time of Revelation, Kunstverein Göttingen (August 18 – October 6, 2024)

Thomias Radin, Hidden in Plain Sight, Esther Schipper, Berlin (March 16 – April 13, 2024)

Thomias Radin, POLYCHROME – The Myth of Karukera and Cibuqueira, Galerie Wedding, Berlin (June 16, – August 26, 2023)

Produced by Anri Sala in Italy where the technique has been practiced for centuries, the frescoes that make up this three-part work are painted on specially prepared panels using the ancient technique of painting with pigment dissolved in water onto wet plaster. Set into the wet plaster are also pieces of marble that are integrated into the composition, similar to intarsia, flush with the surface of the plaster. The work is hung on the wall.

Sala’s group of frescoes, entitled Surface to Air, take as point of departure the artist’s own photographs of clouds, generally at a location specified by the coordinates in the title. Their billowing abstract shapes represent the epitome of changeability and constant flux, introducing to the new frescoes another layer of temporal dissonance. Thus, fresco—a medium that necessitates a speedy execution but then can survive over centuries or, under the right conditions, even millennia—and photography—a medium that, in its original analog form, records a moment in time—here capture a meteorological phenomenon, a formation created by an unimaginably complex interaction of unseen natural forces.

Another important aspect of these new works is the marble inlays. Playing on the colors of the fresco, the distinct material recalls the marble dust traditionally included in the rough ground (arriccio) on which the finer plaster (intonaco) is applied. The inlays evoke an even broader temporal register, that of the geological time it took to produce the crystallized stone with its distinct colors and striations.

The Extended Object series captures the fleeting motion of liquid. These paintings extend Tauba Auerbach’s ongoing research into inventing tools and techniques that induce specific material behaviors. By pouring rhythmic droplets of pigment and manipulating the canvas below, the artist allows the paint to pool and shift, harnessing the flow of color to coax out delicate patterns. The paintings give form to a temporal process, the sequential deposit of dissolved pigment. But the gestures employed to rhythmically direct the placement of paint or to modify the expansion of the motifs remain hidden.

Mauerpark, executed in oil on canvas, references a park in Prenzlauer Berg, located in former East Berlin, in its title.

The painting depicts three male figures, topless, distributed throughout the picture plane. In the upper right of the canvas, a cat-like fox-colored figure that draws on a Disney-aesthetic makes an appearance, and gazes down at the carefree men.

The young men in Bisky’s work function as proxies for the fragile status of homoerotic aesthetics under totalitarian regimes, embodying their tension, vulnerability, and latent instability.

A recurring motif of Bisky's paintings are tromp l’oeil-like depictions of torn posters with parts of words or single letters of text remaining. The reference to the aesthetic of the French post-World War II artists known as "affichistes" (from French affiche meaning poster) is not only formal but conceptual, pointing to the larger context of that moment in the late 1950s and 1960s. The affichistes drew on Abstract expressionist aesthetics but grew out of the radical politics of reappropriation (detournement) and urban wanderings (dérive) of the Situationist International.

The artist’s 1981 move from Timișoara where he had originally developed his art, engaged with other artists and taught at University to the much smaller town of Sibiu initiated what Erwin Kessler has called an “inner emigration” that began long before the actual departure from Romania to Germany in 1986. The loss of his artistic context and the isolation of the new environment intensified the artist’s retreat to observation of the natural world and even to an identification with nature. Initiated by a series of intense dreams, to which the artist referred as apparitions, Bertalan began a series of emotionally charged drawings charged that insert the artist’s body into those of plants, creating hybrid formations.

Executed in oil on linen, Stella Guida by Sara Buckner depicts a feminine figure seated on a stone fall in front of a calm sea below a starless night sky.

Her facial expression remains deliberately ambiguous, suspended between shyness, ennui, and blankness, while an orange starfish adorns the figure’s head. Beside her right hand appears a small, apparition-like figure astride a horse. The work sustains a mysterious, dreamlike, and subtly surreal atmosphere, resisting any singular or reductive interpretation.

Sarah Buckner is a storyteller. Her image world is inspired by multiple sources: real-life encounters, the dreams that sprang from them, books, and films. Thinking in paint, and through painting, Buckner has developed an intuitive and fluid approach that transforms these impressions through her material practice.

Monkeys are recurrent motifs in Buckner’s oeuvre often depicted as a companion of a person. In Buckner’s Hohes Lied zu tief/changes, an oil painting and charcoal on linen, a lone monkey is depicted. The animal is shown playing a flute on the edge of a cliff, giving it a playful, soulful, almost human character. Seated on the cliff, the animal, is pictured on the left side of the composition, while most of the composition is occupied by a blue expanse that blends sea and sky. In the top right corner, diagonal to the monkey, a bird flying on the horizon is visible.