Grace Weaver @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin - 'Mothers' Exhibition

Grace Weaver: Mothers

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

11 September – 29 November 2025

Grace Weaver 

Untitled (Madonna of the Pinks), 2025

Photo: def image

© Grace Weaver, courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler

Galerie Max Hetzler presents Mothers, an exhibition of new paintings by Grace Weaver at Goethestrasse 2/3. This marks the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery, and her first in one of the Berlin spaces.

In her latest series, Grace Weaver turns to archetypal motifs, including the mother and child, and the female nude. For Weaver, the body is not just a subject but a site – a stage on which line is choreographed in lyrical gestures, and through which emotion comes to the fore. Despite their monumental scale, Weaver’s new works disclose humble subjects and tender sentiments.

Across a series of large square-format canvases, Weaver’s mothers pose in enveloping embraces: swaying, kneeling, or cradling children in their laps. Stretching five metres in length, two paintings present the mother and child in frieze-like proportions, drawing the viewer’s eye along their sweeping arcs. Along the gallery’s far wall, a grid of twenty-six smaller canvases unfolds a chorus of female figures in tender embrace – some nurturing children, others folding their arms around themselves in bowing stances reminiscent of Eve or Aphrodite, attempting to shield their nude bodies from the viewer’s gaze. By contrast, the mother and child paintings propose a triangularity of gazes: at times either mother or child stares outward, at others they remain locked in one another’s gaze. Elongated, curving necks recall the postures of Weaver’s ‘Flowers’ series (2024). As in this earlier body of work, Weaver’s central motif is recognisable, and yet drifts towards abstraction; limbs taper into space, and abbreviated lines merely suggest garments or contours. Whether in flowers or figures, Weaver’s primary subject seems to be posture itself, used as a means to convey subtleties of mood.

Grace Weaver paints on the floor, using an all-over fresco-like process. Over a base of black, she applies watery matte washes of paint with over-sized brushes. Working wet-on-wet, the artist paints ‘in the round’, moving around the canvas as though executing a dance of deliberate, curving gestures. The saturated canvas becomes a responsive ground, absorbing each mark and resisting revision. Lines rhyme and harmonise. Surrounding the figure’s arcing outlines, haptic drips from Weaver’s overloaded brush register her movements, bringing the immediacy of drawing into painting. Grace Weaver prepares for each painting in successive ballpoint pen sketches, reducing figures to a few essential lines, so that the final act of painting proceeds in a determined choreography. The painting’s palettes – inky cobalts, pale pastels and papery cream tones – recall the materials of drawing.

Weaver’s investigation of the mother and child motif began in sketches of a diminutive fifth-century BCE Boeotian terracotta figurine of a woman nursing a young child, inspired by its formal abstraction and emotive reality. As she developed the series, references multiplied, with subsequent works drawing from Cranach’s Madonnas, with their crimped coiffure and rubbery anatomy. Throughout, Grace Weaver cites poses from Cypriot sandstone figurines, Netherlandish altarpieces, Egyptian statuettes of Isis and Horus, Orthodox Marian icons, and countless ancient Greek ‘kourotrophoi.’ Despite the breadth of influences, in their immediacy, Weaver’s paintings step outside of the specificities of time, space and allegory. Unadorned and close, they speak not of divine authority but of physical intimacy, vulnerability and a rare looseness of posture and presence.

Grace Weaver’s work is also on view as part of a joint exhibition with Günther Förg at Galerie Max Hetzler | Salon in Athens through 8 November 2025.

GRACE WEAVER (b. 1989, Vermont) lives and works in New York and Berlin. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held in international institutions including Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Neues Museum Nürnberg (both 2023–2024); Oldenburger Kunstverein; Kunstpalais Erlangen (both 2019); Kunstverein Reutlingen (2017); and DakshinaChitra, Chennai (2012). Weaver’s work has also been exhibited in group exhibitions including Oldenburger Kunstverein (2025); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Braunsfelder, Cologne; Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin; Miettinen Collection, Berlin; Neue Galerie, Gladbeck; Villa Merkel, Esslingen (all 2022); Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2021); Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2018); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (2016); University of Georgia (2015); Burlington City Arts (2013); Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Burlington (2012); Colburn Gallery, University of Vermont, Burlington (2011); and Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne (2010).

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

Goethestrasse 2/3, 10623 Berlin

www.maxhetzler.com

Hans Josephsohn and Günther Förg – A Dialogue @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Hans Josephsohn and Günther Förg – A Dialogue

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

5 September – 25 October 2025

Galerie Max Hetzler presents Hans Josephsohn and Günther Förg – A Dialogue at Potsdamer Strasse 77-87, Berlin. In this first joint exhibition of the two artists, sculptures by Hans Josephsohn with their tactile surfaces are juxtaposed with Günther Förg’s grid paintings from the 1990s. Reliefs by both artists from different decades are on display on the upper floor of the gallery. 

Hans Josephsohn and Günther Förg came from different generations and only met a few times, but from the late 1990s onwards, Förg was familiar with Josephsohn’s sculptures. Following his usual practice, he studied his fellow artist's work and was especially fascinated by its materiality. Through Förg’s advocacy, Rudi Fuchs, then director of the Stedelijk Museum, became aware of the sculptor’s work, which led to Josephsohn's solo exhibition in Amsterdam in 2002. 

In contrast to Förg’s keen interest in his contemporaries, Josephsohn was more solitary in his working habits. His work is characterised by a fascination with mass and forms in space, which he repeatedly recalibrated using specific and recurring shapes over the course of six decades of his career as a sculptor. Since the 1950s, the artist sought to increase the volume of his figures by working with quick-drying plaster, which he had cast in brass or bronze. Traces of his search for the perfect expression of the human body can be seen in the additions and removals of material and in the imprints of his fingers on the finished works. The sculptures are characterised by an urgent physical materiality that combines the immediacy of technique with an aesthetic of timelessness in order to capture ‘réalité vivante’ (living reality). Working from the model, he created individual half-figures, such as the works shown in this exhibition, which were created between 1995 and 2002. Some of them are named, such as Untitled (Lola), 1996, or Untitled (Madeleine), 2000, yet it is only in viewing them that their portrait-like nature can be grasped from the blurring of their forms.

Förg’s interest in Josephsohn’s sculptures related to their materiality, as well as to their uncompromising nature. When he encountered the other artist's work, he had begun to work on the shimmering grids of the paintings known in literature as ‘grid pictures.’ The proximity between painting and three-dimensionality, which Förg repeatedly explored, becomes apparent in the open, diffused structures of the grids. He was influenced by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and his use of non-figurative elements and colour fields. These works are characterised by the painterly treatment of the canvas, the layered lines of the same colours, and the unorthodox way in which the distinction between negative and positive space threatens to dissolve. The green-black-blue cross-hatched Untitled, 1995 weaves vertical and horizontal brushstrokes into a dense pattern, forming an airy whole that appears almost like fabric when viewed from a distance. The large portrait Untitled, 1996, on the other hand, is dominated by impasto ochre grids that seem to block the view of a hidden green background close to the surface of the painting. Förg’s multifaceted approach to art is manifested in the two-dimensional works shown here through subtle allusions to structures and spaces beyond the pictorial plane, thus questioning the boundaries between the artistic disciplines of architecture, painting and sculpture.

While Josephsohn’s monumental sculptures on the lower floor of the exhibition form ‘the counterweight to our bodies,’ which Förg describes in conversation with Christoph Schenker [1] as a necessary corporeal counterpart to his painting, relief works by both artists are juxtaposed on the upper floor of the exhibition alongside a large half-figure Untitled (Ruth), 1968, and two grid paintings hanging parenthetically on each end of the room. Concrete reliefs such as Untitled, 1990 by Günther Förg hang alongside bronze reliefs of similar format such as Hans Josephsohn’s Untitled, 1974. Similarities become apparent in the dialogue between the works, in their emphasis on weight and presence. In the interplay of surface and light, the concept of the dialogical exhibition becomes tangible for the viewer.

[1] Günther Förg in conversation with Christoph Schenker, 1989, quoted in Günther Förg: Trunk Road and Branch Roads, exh. cat., Shanghai: Long Museum, 2023, p. 14.

Hans Josephsohn (1920–2012) lived and worked in Zurich. Solo exhibitions of his works have been held at international institutions, including the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (2024–2025); MASI – Museo d'arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano (2020–2021); Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen (2020); ICA Milano (2019); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2018); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2013); Lismore Castle Arts (2012); MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2008); Kolumba - Kunstmuseum des Erzbistums Köln (2005); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002), among other major museums. Works by Hans Josephsohn were prominently featured at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). 

Works by Hans Josephsohn can be found in the collections of the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Kolumba – Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Kunstmuseum Appenzell; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Günther Förg (1952–2013) was born in Füssen and died in Freiburg after living and working in Areuse, Switzerland. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions, including Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris; CAC Málaga (both 2024); Long Museum, Shanghai (2023); Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dallas Museum of Art (both 2018); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2015); Fundación Luis Seoane, A Coruña; Museum Brandhorst, Munich (both 2014); Museo Carlo Bilotti, Rome (2013); Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg (2008); Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art; Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (both 1991); and Secession, Vienna (1990), among others.

Works by Günther Förg are included in major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Broad, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunsthaus Zürich; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; mumok, Vienna; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Saint Louis Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, to name but a few.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

Potsdamer Strasse 77-87, Berlin

www.maxhetzler.com

Richard Prince: Posters Exhibition @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Marfa, Texas

Richard Prince: Posters

Galerie Max Hetzler, Marfa, Texas

Through 7 December 2025

Richard Prince 

Untitled, 2016 

Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio

Hetzler presents Posters, a solo exhibition of works by Richard Prince, for the gallery’s annual presentation in Marfa, Texas, through December 7, 2025.

One of the foremost representatives of appropriation art, Richard Prince has been recontextualising images and ideas from mass media, advertising and entertainment since the 1970s. Often based on products of everyday American culture, his practice is one of ‘post-production’, which reworks cultural phenomena and their attributes to rewrite received narratives and our understanding of history.

The present exhibition brings together a large body of Richard Prince’s Poster works on canvas and on paper, created between 2014 and 2024. The large canvases show reproductions of advertisements for mail-order posters, as were often found at the back of magazines in the second half of the 20th century. Hugely popular at the time, these printed images represent touchstones of early counter-cultural magazines, which are among Richard Prince’s long-term interests. The motifs of political slogans and far-out art in the form of cheap posters are singled out and chosen by the artist. They find their origins in the hippie head-shop culture of the late ’60s, which also encompassed magazines, music and comedy records. Taped-off and blocked-out from the pages where they were listed, the images have been blown up so that the resulting works are far larger than the original posters.

In their seemingly arbitrary selection, the poster images combine anti-war slogans, reproductions of Modern art, graphic-design interpretations of nude couples, and pictures of cats in sometimes humorously disparate compilations. The revolutionary attitude of the late ’60s student protests is juxtaposed against the self-indulgence of hippie culture in this side-by-side illustration of popular visual language.

If cultural attitudes are transported through everyday imagery, then  Richard Prince makes them transparent by applying the focus of his artistic practice to these source materials. Method and implication are translated into different contexts and, with his meticulous attention to detail, the artist decodes the communication of contemporary visual language and the ideas which are concealed within it.

Artist Richard Prince

Richard Prince (b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone) lives and works in Upstate New York. Prince’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in international institutions, including Georgia Museum of Art, Athens (2024); Louisiana Museum of Art, Humblebaek; The Karpidas Collection (both 2022–2023); Museum for Modern Art, Weserburg (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019–2020); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires Malba; Espace Louis Vuitton, Beijing; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (all 2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017–2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2014); Picasso Museum, Malaga (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon (2011); Serpentine Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (both 2008); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007–2008); Kunsthalle Zürich (2002); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001); and MAK, Vienna (2000), among others. The artist participated in the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2003, as well as the Whitney Biennial in 2004, 1997, 1987 and 1985.

Works by Richard Prince are in the collections of international museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; The Broad, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston; Kunstmuseum Basel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection, Venice; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

1976 Antelope Hills Road, Marfa, Texas

www.maxhetzler.com

Richard Prince: Posters

Galerie Max Hetzler, Marfa, Texas, 17 May – 7 December 2025

Tursic & Mille @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris - Exposition "Lavis en Rose"

Tursic & Mille - Lavis en Rose

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris

6 Septembre – 11 Octobre 2025

Tursic & Mille 

Lavis en Rose, 2025 

© Tursic & Mille, photo: I & W, 2025

« Le sujet, dans la peinture de Tursic & Mille, est un leurre à tous les sens du terme : il trompe et il appâte... Car le véritable sujet de leurs œuvres est la peinture, dans une tradition classique qui va de Picabia à Christopher Wool. » 1 

Eric Troncy

La galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, présente Lavis en Rose, une exposition de Tursic & Mille, la sixième avec la galerie Max Hetzler et la première dans la galerie parisienne.

Avec un partenariat artistique qui s'étend sur plus de deux décennies, les peintres Tursic & Mille, mènent une réflexion profonde sur la peinture et sur la notion de représentation. À travers une pratique empirique d’une peinture ouverte à toutes les possibilités conceptuelles et matérielles, aux accidents constitutifs du médium, ils abordent la peinture, aussi bien en tant qu’objet que comme sujet. Réinventant sans cesse leur pratique, s’intéressant autant au concept, au process, à la matérialité de la peinture, qu’à l’utilisation de l’imagerie, ils développent une manière singulière de penser en peinture aujourd’hui.

Lavis en Rose, commence donc, avec son titre, par une homophonie, un jeu de mot, un malentendu : Lavis / La vie. Ainsi, un cliché, une promesse du bonheur se transforme en simple procédé technique à dominance rose (rose étant l’anagramme d’Éros). Ce malentendu est peut-être aussi celui qu’ils traquent dans l’idée même de peinture figurative, avec l’éternelle conflictualité interne image/peinture.

Le Rose, ici, agit comme élément perturbateur, tel un filtre à double usage : physiquement, il ajoute une couche matérielle au tableau (le poussant parfois à la limite du monochrome), sémantiquement enfin, en instillant une distance, une sensation d’instabilité qui agit tel un voile qui simultanément perturbe tout en affirmant le caractère complexe de la perception et de la représentation. Lavis en Rose est une traversée, aussi douce qu’incendiaire, d’un monde en tension.

L’exposition commence par un tableau programmatique. Un portrait d’une jeune femme, qui regarde ses doigts tachés de peinture rose. Mi-surprise, mi-dégoutée, elle semble se demander ce qu’elle va en faire, quoi en faire. « Ce tableau pourrait servir de portrait à n'importe quel peintre au travail, confronté à son démon, ces pigments dilués dans l'huile, incontrôlables, collés aux doigts, corps et âme, entêtants et rebelles aux coups de pinceau qui prétendent avoir tout pouvoir sur eux. Et pourtant, la peinture fait ce qu'elle veut : elle surgit de nulle part, gâchant l'image autant qu'elle la trace ». 2

Dans la première salle, deux paysages se font face. Un paysage lointain, un ciel étoilé rose, l’infiniment grand, en vis-à-vis, un ciel plus proche, ciel traversé par des fusées, l’infiniment humain. Sur les murs latéraux, deux petits panneaux de bois peints, deux natures mortes où figurent des mégots de cigarettes.

Au centre de l’exposition, l’Hallali inversé, se déroule sur trois tableaux. Utilisant plusieurs sources iconographiques, différents imaginaires, différents styles de peinture, différentes temporalités, comme si la scène provenait d’un souvenir parsemé de confusion. Dans un sous-bois en proie à des flammes symboliques, des animaux, ensemble, cèdent à une fuite panique, face à une menace non identifiée, qui n’est plus localisée, mais qui infuse au-delà de la composition. En opposition à ce mouvement, statique, une femme peintre est assise devant son chevalet, palette à la main, pinceau suspendu. À côté d’elle, un homme en costume, cigarette à la main, observe nonchalamment, comme s’il assistait à une scène ordinaire. Tursic & Mille interrogent la nature anachronique du medium en opposant la frénésie et l’urgence au temps long de la peinture.

Paysage Rose, un diptyque dans lequel une maison pavillonnaire est dévorée par des flammes qui s’élèvent dans un ciel rose délavé. Cette œuvre s’inscrit dans une série initiée en 2005, où le feu, omniprésent, devient une figure métaphysique : moins un évènement qu’un état latent, il habite le paysage et altère la lumière. Le lavis rose qui recouvre toute la surface adoucit et voile l’image, le rendant quasiment irréel et plus troublant. Le tableau est ici divisé en deux, scindant ainsi la temporalité interne de la composition en deux événements possibles.

Un portrait d’une jeune femme fixe le spectateur d’un regard vague, elle pose dans un canapé au milieu d’une clairière embrasée, habitant étrangement la composition. La forêt qui l’entoure est en flammes, pourtant, la scène reste étonnamment calme, tout est placé avec soin, comme dans un catalogue de décoration. Cette fusion de l’espace domestique à l'espace sauvage, cette uniformisation créée par le recouvrement d’une couche transparente rose, installe un trouble, une ambiguïté existentielle.

En parallèle, au 46 rue du Temple, est présenté une sélection de peintures sur papier issues de Papers 2018-2022, révélant l’aspect empirique de leur pratique. Ces œuvres accidentelles et inconscientes accumulées pendant plus de vingt ans donnent à voir le travail en train de se faire et créent in fine des peintures abstraites involontaires, des matérialisations de la pratique même de la peinture, un émerveillement constant et brut de la couleur. Les pigments dilués dans l'huile, incontrôlable. Et pourtant, la peinture fait ce qu'elle veut.

Ida Tursic (née en 1974 à Belgrade, en Serbie) et Wilfried Mille (née en 1974 à Boulogne-Sur-Mer, en France) vivent et travaillent à Mazamet, en France. Les œuvres de Tursic & Mille ont été présentées, entre autres, dans des expositions personnelles le FRAC – Fonds régional d'art contemporain de Normandie, Caen (2023); le Musée Consortium, Dijon (2022); Le Portique, Le Havre (2021); le Muzeum Sztuki, Łodz (2020); la Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017); le Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dole (2011); le FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (2011) et le Musée de Serignan (2008-2009). Le duo d'artistes a reçu le prix de la Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca en 2020 et le prix de la Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard en 2009. Ils ont été nominés pour le prix Marcel Duchamp en 2019.

Les oeuvres de Tursic & Mille font partie des collections permanentes de la Collection Berardo, Lisbonne; du Centre Pompidou, Paris; de la Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; le FNAC – Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris; le FRAC – Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand; le FRAC – Bourgogne, Dijon; le FRAC – Le Plateau, Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dôle; et le Musée Régional d'Art Contemporain de Sérignan, entre autres.

_________

1 Eric Troncy dans le dossier de presse pour Tursic & Mille - Tenderness, Consortium Museum

2 Judicaël Lavrador, Libération, 15 mars 2022 

GALERIE MAX HETZLER, PARIS

46 & 57, rue du Temple, 75004 Paris

www.maxhetzler.com

Thomas Struth @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Thomas Struth

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

25 April – 21 June 2025

THOMAS STRUTH

Semi Submersible Rig, DSME Shipyard, 

Geoje Island 2007, 2007

© Thomas Struth 

Courtesy of Galerie Max Hetzler

Galerie Max Hetzler presents a solo exhibition of works by THOMAS STRUTH at Potsdamer Strasse 77-87 in Berlin. This exhibition offers visitors a new and, at times, surprising insight into Struth’s oeuvre over the past four decades.

Thomas Struth’s work is characterised by his long-term and careful pursuit of themes that revolve, in various guises, around the relationship between people and their environment. His photographs, which harmonise forms of documentation and contemplation, capture today’s society through images of cultural spaces, as well as the natural world, portraiture and places of industrial and technological innovation.

At the start of the exhibition, one of Struth’s most recent works, Hinakapoʻula, Hawaiʻi 2024, draws viewers into the depths of densely wooded Hawaiian mountain. On the gallery’s far wall, Semi Submersible Rig, DSME Shipyard, Geoje Island 2007 depicts an industrial megastructure on the southern coast of South Korea. Its monumental size and four mighty pillars are emphasised by the perspective of the steel colossus which stretches up to the upper edge of the picture.

The earliest portraits in the exhibition, taken in the 1980s, constitute some of the artist’s most rarely seen works. Thomas Struth has long been interested in the depiction of people, as exemplified in his celebrated Family Portraits, which convey the intricacies of family dynamics. By contrast, the portraits in this exhibition focus on the relationship between subject and photographer. They seek to capture the presence of the individual and thus make visible an incomprehensible yet universally recognisable facet of humanity.

Since the late 1980s, Thomas Struth has also explored the special relationship people have with works of art, and the places that house them. His Museum Photographs depict viewers confronting their own civilisation across the ages. In 2023, the artist spent several days at The Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he photographed visitors in front of Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, 1867–1868 and Edgar Dégas’ The Bellelli Family, 1958–1967. In the resulting diptych, titled The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Diptych), New York 2023, Thomas Struth alludes to a historic connection between the two artists: following his death, Manet’s family cut up his painting to sell it in parts; the surviving fragments were later acquired by Degas, and were eventually reassembled in the late 1970s. Adding further layers to the work, Thomas Struth captures present-day museum visitors as they photograph the painting with their luminous smartphones. Spaces, times, cultures and attitudes are layered and combined, mediated via the artworks and their audience, and the viewer of the photograph.

The New Pictures from Paradise represented in this exhibition date from the early 2000s, the decade that saw a heightened awareness of the fragility and importance of the natural world. In these photographs, Struth aims to depict a diversity so dense that individual components are no longer identifiable to the human eye and an impression of inaccessibility prevails instead.

A similar experience is at play in Struth’s Nature & Politics photographs, initiated in 2007. In the present exhibition, these are represented through scenes from aerospace technology and nuclear fusion test centres. In Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery, Max Planck Ipp, Garching 2009, a bewildering tangle of colour-coded wires conveys the unfathomable reality of advanced technology to the untrained eye. Its promise of future innovation remains abstract and intangible.

THOMAS STRUTH (b. 1954) lives and works in Berlin. Struth has exhibited his work at Galerie Max Hetzler on a regular basis since 1987. Major retrospectives were held at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2019) and the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017). In 2016, his comprehensive solo exhibition Nature & Politics opened at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, before being presented at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, the High Museum, Atlanta, the Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, and finally the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri. Other major solo exhibitions have taken place at international institutions including MAST Foundation, Bologna (2019); Aspen Art Museum (2018); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014 and 2003); Kunsthaus Zürich; Museu Serralves, Porto and K20, Düsseldorf (all 2011); Museo del Prado, Madrid (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Dallas Museum of Art (2002).

Thomas Struth’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthaus Zürich; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reine Sofía, Madrid; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate, London, among others.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

Potsdamer Strasse 77-87, 10785 Berlin

www.maxhetzler.com

Leilah Babirye @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin - Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous Grotesque / Die prächtige Groteske) Exhibition

Leilah Babirye 

Ekimyula Ekijjankunene

(The Gorgeous Grotesque / 

Die prächtige Groteske)

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

1 May – 28 June 2025

LEILAH BABIRYE 

Nakakeeto from the Kuchu Mutima (Heart) Clan, 2023–2024

© Leilah Babirye, courtesy of Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Photo © Jonty Wilde

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin presents Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous  Grotesque / Die prächtige Groteske), a solo exhibition of new works by LEILAH BABIRYE at Goethestrasse 2/3 and Bleibtreustrasse 15/16. This is the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery.

Language and history form the basis of Leilah Babirye's work. Her sculptures and works on paper are characterised by the appropriation and reassignment of terms and categorisations. Her practice is influenced by her own biography, her experiences of homophobia around the world, and the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Uganda that forced her to flee to the USA. In her multidisciplinary practice, she uses metal, ceramics, found objects, and hand-carved or chain-sawed wood, incorporating elements of traditional West and Central African iconography into a contemporary context. Her sculptures present real or imagined portraits of the Queer community from the African continent as well as her new homeland, representing an ever-growing LGBTQ+ elective family. While she previously worked on her wooden sculptures using burning as a tool of manipulation, she now uses a variety of other techniques including nailing, assembling, weaving and polishing to focus on the materiality of the works, before adorning them with found materials.

The current exhibition presents new sculptures made from wood, glazed ceramic and bronze, as well as a set of drawings on paper. The title both refers to the ostracisation experienced by members of the LGBTQ+ community and highlights the beauty of this community and Babirye's work. The concept of the grotesque is of particular interest to the artist, not only for its art historical significance, but for the dualism it sets up between the repulsive and the beautiful. This juxtaposition is reflected in many details within the exhibition, from vibrant dripping glazes paired with used tyres, to smooth burnished wood paired with rusty found objects. Combined with larger-than-life organic forms which simultaneously intimidate and invite the viewer, all of these elements come together in what Leilah Babirye calls Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous Grotesque / Die prächtige Groteske).

The sculptures range from a small group of figures to mask-like heads and faces, and monumental totems. The scale and presence of the works, which symbolically occupy the space around them, is an essential aspect of Babirye's artistic practice. Some of the heads are encircled by voluptuous collars, while other figures sport body or hair ornaments made from discarded bicycle parts, such as chains or tyres – a symbol for the artist of progress and movement. As a motif, the mask simultaneously references West African handicrafts, the style of which Leilah Babirye appropriates, and how LGBTQ+ people in Uganda must conceal their identity. For Babirye, transforming discarded objects into something beautiful is an expression of the resilience of the Queer community. Its members are referred to in the Luganda language by the derogatory term ebisiyaga, which describes the husk of the sugarcane which is usually thrown away. By deliberately repurposing neglected materials, Leilah Babirye reveals the beauty in the supposedly worthless. The set of works on paper in vibrant colours, entitled Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card), shows individuals from Queer and Trans communities or drag artists who Babirye has noticed in everyday life, on the street or while travelling. She paints them from memory. The portraits function as alternative passport photos, in which freedom of expression and true identity can exist unprovoked.

In the gallery space at Bleibtreustrasse 15/16, the sculptures which form Abambowa (Royal Guard Who Protects the King), 2025, are lined up, side by side, on a plinth. Abambowa is the name for the highest guard in the traditional kingdom of Buganda. The titles of Babirye's works often refer to names from the Ugandan clan system of pre-colonial history, which are based on plants or animals. In this way, the artist creates a sense of belonging which celebrates the members of the Queer community. The coded term kuchu (‘queer’), which can be found in some of the titles, is here afforded a dignified meaning.

Leilah Babirye's oeuvre unites tradition, history and personal experience into a universal connection. Her work gives visibility and dignity to marginalised communities, celebrating resilience and diversity. Past and progress are not in opposition: ‘I always say that if you forget your history, you don't know who you are and where you're going,’ the artist states. ‘I can't live in the present or look to the future without also looking back, and this back and forth is evident in my work.’ Grounded in her heritage, Leilah Babirye incorporates references into her practice and uses their artistic transformation as a means not just to survive, but to thrive and flourish.

[1] L. Babirye, in ‘Artist Leilah Babirye: “I want to help people feel a sense of belonging”’, Art Basel, 7 March 2024.

LEILAH BARBIRYE (b. 1985, Kampala, Uganda) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco (2024–2025); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton (2024). Babirye's work has also been presented in group exhibitions, including the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia; Sainsbury's Centre, Norwich (both 2024); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Whitworth, The University of Manchester (both 2023); mumok, Vienna; The Africa Centre, London (both 2022); Coventry Biennial (2021); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Bric, Brooklyn (all 2019); Trapholt Museum, Kolding (2016); and Kampala Art Biennale (2014).

Leilah Babirye's work is held in the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; mumok, Vienna; RISD Museum, Providence; Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Shandong, among others. 

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

Goethestrasse 2/3 & Bleibtreustrasse 15/16, Berlin

www.maxhetzler.com

Sarah Crowner @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris "Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze" Exhibition

Sarah Crowner 

Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze 

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris 

26 April – 21 June 2025

SARAH CROWNER

Black and Blues and Oranges, both 2024 (details) 

© Sarah Crowner

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, presents Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze, a solo exhibition by SARAH CROWNER, uniting a new series of embroideries, bronze sculptures and canvases. This is the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, and her first presentation in Paris.

Sarah Crowner is renowned for her investigations into colour, materiality and form. Her works, which span painting, sculpture, collage, tile installations and set design, invite a close engagement with the viewer. Subverting expectations of structure, texture and palette, they elicit new ways of slow and deliberate looking. For this exhibition, Sarah Crowner foregrounds abstract colour fields and juxtaposes hard and soft, reflective and absorbent, surfaces.

Five wool embroidered works from 2024 mark a new development in the artist’s practice. At first glance, they appear to be monochromatic canvases, each composed from a vibrating expanse of colour. Contemplated up close, however, they reveal themselves to be handmade objects, created stitch-by-stitch in snaking tendrils, from a varied range of hues. This subtle yet integral plurality is reflected in the titles of the works: Reds, Oranges, Blacks and Blues, Violets, and Whites. Under the changing, dappled light, one almost perceives the individual threads of wool as impasto brushstrokes, which take partial inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, 1889, as well as his paintings made in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The textured palette and swirling intensity of his canvases can be traced in the eddying surfaces of Crowner’s embroideries.

Collaboration plays a central role in Crowner’s practice. For the new ‘Tableaux en Laine’, she worked closely with a group of more than twenty embroiderers, based in Maine, USA. Ranging from school age to septuagenarians, they worked together to meticulously stitch each composition by hand over many days, based on ‘stitch map’ drawings created by the artist. These ‘maps’ are used as directional guides to translate colour and line into physical objects and ground the works within a formal painterly language. ‘It always goes back to painting’, the artist states.

While making her recent embroideries, Sarah Crowner was looking closely at the work of Richard Serra, from his early steel slabs to his black, monochrome drawings. Ostensibly simple, the drawings reveal what Sarah Crowner describes as ‘this heavy working, made gesture by gesture’ from thick oil sticks. Similarly, despite first appearances, his weighty and dense sculptures are speckled with patina, embedding within them a sense of passing time. Whether cast, stitched or sewn, this inherent slipperiness between expectation, perception and reality lies at the heart of Crowner’s practice.

In response to the wool paintings, Crowner’s ‘Pierres en Bronze’ sculptures are displayed almost as if they are onlookers, their highly polished surfaces reflecting spills and splashes of colour from the lush wool works. As the viewer moves through the exhibition, the bronze surfaces activate, generating new abstractions which are constantly in flux. Hard, heavy and solid, the sculptures are simultaneously ephemeral, as light, time and transience permeate their shifting surfaces. These Stone sculptures, as their titles insinuate, are based on small stones that Sarah Crowner has collected over the years from Rincon Beach in California, near where she grew up. With their natural holes and pockmarks, the stones resemble small Modernist sculptures, transformed here from their once matte and lightweight forms into enlarged and shiny bronzes.

In her sewn canvases, exhibited in the gallery space in Paris, Sarah Crowner melds order and spontaneity. Working according to a process she describes as ‘slow, fast, slow, fast, instinctual versus methodical’, she draws inspiration from elements of nature as much as art history. In Skyline (Blues) and Seafloor (Greens), both 2025, the shapes echo one another, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of déjà vu. First, the paintings appear as familiar fields of drawn lines, forms and colours; it is only from up close that one sees their inherent structure: cut fragments carefully sutured to form a greater whole.

Emphasising the act of transformation in her work, Crowner’s hard sculptures, soft textured embroideries, and cut and sewn canvases each encapsulate something of their opposite, encouraging the viewer to contemplate the yin-yang dualities of the everyday.

SARAH CROWNER (b. 1974, Philadelphia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions including SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2025); The Chinati Foundation, Marfa (2022–2024); Hill Art Foundation, New York; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (both 2023–2024); Auroras and Casa de Vidro, Instituto Bardi, São Paulo (2023); Museo Amparo, Puebla (2022–2023); KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville (2018–2019); and MASS MoCA, North Adams (2016–2017). Sarah Crowner’s works are in the collections of major international institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; The Contemporary Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER, PARIS

46 rue du Temple, 75004 Paris

www.maxhetzler.com

Sergey Kononov @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Sergey Kononov

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

1 May – 4 June 2025

Galerie Max Hetzler presents an exhibition of ten paintings by SERGEY KONONOV at Bleibtreustrasse 45 in Berlin. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

In his intimate portraits, Ukrainian painter Sergey Kononov captures quiet moments of solitude or togetherness. Light-drenched and pooled in grainy, ochre tones, Kononov’s canvases exude a tenderness and familiarity reminiscent of a bygone era, thus probing the conventions of realist painting. ‘It’s important for me to capture a luminosity. I want to recreate the look of old films – that grain, that warm light – which I’ve loved my whole life,’ the artist explains. [1]

In the present exhibition, three closely cropped portraits depict faces obscured by cascading locks of golden hair. Subsumed in their inner selves, eyes closed or cast downward in martyr-like poses, Kononov’s subjects are imbued with the immediacy of photographic snapshots and the timelessness of ancient frescoes.

In other compositions, Sergey Kononov presents lingering glimpses of domestic solitude. A girl falls asleep in the study of an Italian palazzo, slumped over an open book. In another painting, she languidly rests her head on an ornate chair, seemingly caught in a moment of melancholy, the tiled floor beneath her providing a mosaic backdrop. Set in these anachronistic interiors, the contemporary body takes on a distinct ethereal quality, as though suspended in time and place.

Kononov’s subjects are intimate by nature: they usually depict people he is close to, photographed and later eternalised in paint. In one work, a man rests in his companion’s lap, his arms slung around her upper body. In another, a couple sprawls across a sumptuous orange sofa, a vintage rug slipping out from under their bare bodies and onto the wooden floor. As enigmatic as they are exposed, these paintings radiate with raw vulnerability. Rendered against a flat swathe of vivid ochre, a solitary sitter confronts the viewer’s gaze in another composition. With fists raised, he displays his gold-ringed fingers.

Carnal, bold and nostalgic, Kononov’s paintings offer searing tributes to youth in a time of socio-political turbulence. In his depictions, Sergey Kononov is meticulous, as attuned to posture as he is to drapery and pattern. Each surface is rendered with care, built up from diminutive marks and haloed in a golden light that speaks to the artist’s varied influences – from Impressionism to Lucian Freud, Andrew Wyeth and Sandro Botticelli. At once haunting and familiar, fleeting and timeless, Kononov’s portraits unlock something of his protagonists’ inner lives, imbuing the quotidian with a new – and needed – sensuality. 

[1] S. Kononov, ‘Sergey Kononov doesn’t like to be rushed’, Plaster Magazine, October 2024. 

SERGEY KONONOV (b. 1994, Odesa, Ukraine) lives and works in Paris, France. The artist’s work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at Théâtre National de La Criée, Marseille (2020); Ukraine National Art Museum, Kiev (2015); and Museum of Modern Art, Odesa (2014). Kononov’s works are in the public collections of Fondation Francès, Clichy / Senlis; and Museum of Modern Art, Odesa.

GALERIE MAX HETSLER

Bleibtreustrasse 45, Berlin

www.maxhetzler.com

Zhang Wei @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris

Zhang Wei

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris

6 février - 13 mars 2021

ZHANG WEI 

Z-AC2018, 2020 

Oil on linen

200 x 180 cm.; 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 in.

Photo: Yang Chao Photography Beijing

Pour sa première exposition à Paris et la seconde à la galerie Max Hetzler, ZHANG WEI, l’une des figures de proue de la peinture abstraire chinoise, a sélectionné douze peintures et deux huiles sure papier aquarelle réalisées entre 2016 et 2020. L’artiste offre un aperçu de son travail récent empreint de l’influence de l’Action Painting qu’il découvre dans les années 80, marquant un tournant dans sa pratique, et l’incitant à rompre définitivement avec la figuration.

Zhang Wei confronte le spectateur à des toiles souvent monumentales, composées de coups de pinceaux aux couleurs vives et contrastées, suscitant une émotion intense et ajoutant une conscience corporelle à son œuvre. Comme l’évoque C. S. Chinnery « Il y a une énergie violente dans de nombreuses peintures récentes de Zhang Wei, mais ce n’est pas l’élément central. C’est plutôt ce qui sert d’intermédiaire à l’énergie essentielle. Malgré tout le contraste impétueux des couleurs et de la texture, ce qui définit vraiment le travail de Zhang Wei, c’est un sentiment d’équilibre » *.

Sentiment également présent dans trois peintures aux formats plus modestes et aux tonalités plus douces. Composées de touches de bleu, de blanc et de rose, elles semblent dessiner des pétales flottant dans l’eau offrant un apaisement au regard et l’interrogeant sur un possible retour à la figuration. Enfin, deux huiles sur papier aquarelle aux tons vert d’eau sont également présentées. La peinture céladon est versée sur la surface du papier transformant ainsi la couleur en des formes diaphanes, évocatrices de la tentative de prendre une profonde inspiration - à la fois fragile et pénétrante, elles rappellent l’importance de la spiritualité du « Qi » dans le travail de l’artiste.

ZHANG WEI est né en 1952 à Beijing où il vit et travaille. A la fin des années 70, Zhang a travaillé pour le Northern Kun Opera à Beijing. De 1986 à 2005 il vit aux Etats-Unis. Son travail a été exposé dans des institutions internationales dont plus récemment à la M + Sigg Collection, Hong Kong (2016); Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing (2015); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2014); Asia Society, Hong Kong (2013); China Institute Gallery, New York (2011); Yuan Art Museum, Beijing (2010) and CaixaForum, Barcelone (2008). Son travail est présent dans les collections publiques de M + Museum of Visual Culture, Sigg Collection, Hong Kong et de l’Art Institute of Chicago.

*C. S. Chinnery, ‘A colourful dissonance: On the paintings of Zhang Wei’, in Zhang Wei, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2017, p. 29

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

57 rue du Temple, 75004 Paris

www.maxhetzler.com

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin - But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Through 9 January 2021 

CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER

There’ll Be Nobody Hiding

(When That Rough God Goes Riding), 2020

Photo: def image, Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler

Galerie Max Hetzler presents the solo exhibition But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before with recent paintings by CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER at Goethestraße 2/3 in Berlin. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition outside of the USA, and with the gallery.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer creates blistering paintings, loaded with a complex mix of iconography, drawn from the real and the imaginary. The artist grapples with urgent and fundamental issues through the symbolic and at times historical nature of its subjects. Both unflinching and empathic, Dupuy-Spencer gives life to arresting compositions that can be bleak and troubling, at times softer and endearing, in which the worldly and the extraordinary, the holy and the base, merge to present a multitude of possible meanings and narratives.

The paintings exhibited at Galerie Max Hetzler are filled with rich, hyper-narratives which do not cohere into one style, or iconographic concern. Pulling the viewer in different directions, the works form a fragmented, challenging panorama, speaking of humanity in all its duality and contradiction, as it relates to religion, politics, or nature. Moving between the literal and the existential — tensions vital in Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s practice — the works provide an immediate and powerful emotional impact on the viewer, as they come together to explore a range of feelings, from love and hope, to fear, loss, and pain.

There is a strong religious theme running through the exhibition — a subject which has come to the fore of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s interrogation of contemporary experience, in recent years. Included are depictions of Christ and significant places tied to his figure and history such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Messiah’s presumed tomb site nearby. As such, they seek to generate an open discussion around beliefs surrounding the divine, and how they constitute the foundations of our society.

Further works include apocalyptic scenes, such as a seascape in the aftermath of a devastating oil spill, with towering pillars of smoke and birds shown migrating away, and a monstruous volcanic eruption, with glowing lava spills engulfing an entire city. Linking to current affairs, these works hold a mirror up to the viewer, reflecting a society going up in flames. They are lucid and heart-breaking observations, which, devoid of excessive pathos or sentimentalism, reveal Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s painting as an existential act, in a world slouching towards oblivion.

CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER (*1979, New York City) lives and works in Los Angeles. Dupuy-Spencer was awarded the Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship in 2006. The artist's work has been the subject of several exhibitions in renowned institutions like the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Whitney Museum, New York (2017); Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, Lewisburg (2016); Institut of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston and Museum 52, New York (both 2011); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (both 2010); MoMA PS1, New York and Bronx Museum (both 2008); as well as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles (2007). Works by Celeste Dupuy-Spencer are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

Goethestraße 2/3, 10623 Berlin-Charlottenburg

www.maxhetzler.com