Friedrich Kunath @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'Aimless Love' Exhibition

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York

Through December 20, 2025

Friedrich Kunath 

You Told That Joke Twice, 2024-2025 

© Friedrich Kunath, courtesy Pace Gallery

Photography by Evan Walsh

Pace presents an exhibition of new paintings by Friedrich Kunath at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This is the artist’s first solo show in the city since 2019 and his debut presentation with the gallery, which began representing him in May 2025. The exhibition coincides with the release of a new monograph from Monacelli tracing Kunath’s work from the last 30 years. This publication features a new essay by Naomi Fry, staff writer at The New Yorker.

Known for his layered, lyrical work across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, the German-born, Los Angeles-based artist reimagines rich and diverse source material in cathartic images and objects. Many of Kunath’s paintings depict vibrant landscapes of worldly beauty, often incorporating poetic phrases and quotations from music, film, and literature. Drawing inspiration from Romanticism, popular culture, and his own personal history, he imbues his art with a myriad of seemingly disparate references and resonances, navigating the murky spaces between irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy. Thereby, Kunath sees himself as a composer of ideas and images across mediums, working fragments into artworks that become worlds unto themselves.

His first presentation at Pace in New York, Aimless Love, meditates on coming and going, free from intent, with aimless momentum. The works are inspired by the artist’s memories of listening to music while traveling by train or car as a child, looking out the window and watching the world pass by. With his new paintings, Friedrich Kunath aims to immortalize the sense of total presence in those memories and experiences, while acknowledging the paradox of trying to hold onto an inherently fleeting, ephemeral feeling.

Installed in ascending and descending orientations that evoke an airplane’s trajectories during takeoff and landing, Kunath’s latest paintings lean more heavily into a meditative, contemplative space than his past bodies of work. These filmic, deeply personal compositions depict expansive seas and crashing waves, rugged cliffsides, scenic roads, and sweeping vistas, exploring moments of connection and loneliness, love and longing, absurdity and wonder. Seen through the windshield or mirrors of a car, the outside world takes on new resonances in the new works. In I Hope Future Me Is Happy (2024–25), a car rounds the bend of a mountain highway, about to disappear but still in sight. In another, a plane glides through a golden sky with the setting sun blazing through its windows. With Have Love, Will Travel (2025), Friedrich Kunath situates the viewer on the passenger side of a car, a decision that reflects his view of his artistic role.

Kunath’s process for these paintings brings forth a dialogue between the unconscious and the representational image. At the start, he embeds abstractions and writings into wet impasto on his canvases. These underside paintings are made in isolation of the image that is created on top, but, in the end, there is a miraculous synchronicity between the two layers— his writings in the dried, textural impasto are legible in his finished paintings, bringing new meanings and juxtapositions to his compositions. With this “voice coming from behind the image,” Kunath says, he invites the viewer to make their own readings of the work.

In addition to paintings, Aimless Love includes a new sculpture titled Following the Feeling (2025), comprised of one pair of dress shoes, shoelaces, wire, and nylon string. This work is a more somber, existential take on Kunath’s 2009 installation LA Trainer (Permanent Reminder Of A Temporary Feeling)—a new iteration of an artwork that he produced early in his career.

Beyond his exhibition at Pace in New York, Kunath’s work can be found in the collections of the city’s Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

Artist Friedrich Kunath

Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974, Chemnitz, Germany) works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video to create resonant, evocative, and often melancholy compositions. Based in Los Angeles since 2007, Friedrich Kunath creates work grounded in his experiences on the West Coast of the United States and his enduring relationship with Europe. His art combines references to German Romanticism and American popular culture, and it is informed, in part, by his interests in music, tennis, cars, and the practice of collecting. Kunath's paintings depict vibrant landscapes of otherworldly beauty, and he often incorporates poetic phrases and quotations from music or film into his canvases, forging a visual language distinguished by interplays of wit, emotional depth, and cultural memory. The artist graduated from Braunschweig University of Arts, Germany, in 1998.

Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Friedrich Kunath: Coming Home Was as Beautiful as Going Away, KINDLCentre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Friedrich Kunath: I Remain Exhausted, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Friedrich Kunath: I Need Solitude, But I Also Need You, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2024); Friedrich Kunath: AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE (I'LL HAVE THE CALAMARI), G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany (2024); and Friedrich Kunath: One Day I’ll Follow the Byrds (Tutto Pasta), Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2024). 

Friedrich Kunath’s work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, among others. 

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

510 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York, November 7 – December 20, 2025

ringl + pit @ Robert Mann Gallery, NYC - Grete Stern + Ellen Auebach Photography Exhibition

ringl + pit

Robert Mann Gallery, New York

October 23 - December 6, 2025

At the height of the Weimar Republic, an artist duo experimented with gender roles and consumer culture, subverting a commercial world dominated by cheerful faces and brightly illustrated pages. They photographed wigs, mannequins, and merchandise in unorthodox still lives, tapping into Berlin’s vibrant, avant-garde spirit. Their work transcended traditional advertising, highlighting touch, texture, and enigma. Their name: ringl + pit.

Robert Mann Gallery presents ringl + pit, an exhibition featuring rare studio photographs alongside an exceptionally limited-edition portfolio of the duo’s life work—much of which has been rarely exhibited to the public.

ringl + pit were the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (pit). Both trained under Walter Peterhans, the pioneering photography instructor at the Bauhaus, who emphasized precision, formal clarity, and graphic design. In 1930, Stern and Auerbach founded their Berlin-based studio, ringl + pit, blending avant-garde experimentation with commercial portraiture and advertising. Their work emerged during a period of increasing independence for women in Germany, both socially and artistically.

Their photographs challenged conventional advertising norms through striking, surreal, and meticulously composed images. Working collaboratively, the women alternated roles behind the camera and on set, constantly refining each shot until it felt just right. The studio quickly gained a reputation as one of Germany’s most innovative, producing crisp, compelling images that merged modernist aesthetics with subversive wit. Their work was widely recognized, earning international awards and appearing in influential publications such as Die Gebrauchsgraphik and Cahiers d’Art.

Among their most iconic works is Komol Haircoloring Advertisement, an advertisement for hair dye that disrupts traditional beauty standards with artificial hair, a paper cutout silhouette, and metallic mesh. In the Güldenring Cigarettes Advertisemen, they defy convention by omitting both the pack and the hand, instead focusing on a single cigarette protruding from a cellophane wrapper. Their textile commission for Maratti captures a seam running down a luxurious swath of fabric—eschewing the expected female model and instead emphasizing craftsmanship and tactile detail.

The exhibition also includes two rare self-portraits. In pit with Veil, Ellen Auerbach is shown in a stylized headpiece, her sideways glance withheld from the viewer, hinting at the portrait as a form of disguise. In contrast, Grete Stern appears in a tight close-up, her bespectacled face framed with intense, inward focus. Together, these portraits reveal the duo’s deep artistic dialogue—an exploration of selfhood, queerness, and mutual expression. Their work captures the intellectual and creative energy of Weimar-era Germany, a time of extraordinary cultural ferment that was tragically cut short by the rise of the Nazi regime. As progressive Jewish women, both Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach were forced to flee the country in the early 1930s.

Ellen Auerbach eventually settled in New York; Grete Stern made her home in Buenos Aires. Though continents apart, the two remained lifelong friends. In 1985, they co-published Fotografie ringl + pit, a carefully designed portfolio that echoed the aesthetic and material choices of their early 1930s studio work.

Taken together, their photographs illuminate how Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern not only participated in, but helped define the avant-garde spirit of their time. Through humor, experimentation, and a refusal to conform to prescribed gender roles, they carved out a bold new space for visual expression. Their work endures as a testament to photography’s power to question representation, defy convention, and assert identity.

The exhibition ringl + pit is presented in conjunction with Yale University of Art Gallery’s The Shared New Vision of ringl + pit, on view through December 7, 2025. 

ROBERT MANN GALLERY

508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

robertmann.com

Hans-Peter Feldmann @ 303 Gallery, NYC - Exhibition of photographs, sculptures and paintings

Hans-Peter Feldmann

303 Gallery, New York

November 5 - December 20, 2025

303 Gallery presents a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Hans-Peter Feldmann (1941-2023). Coinciding with his retrospective at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (September 18, 2025 – January 11, 2026), this presentation brings together over 40 photographs, sculptures and paintings spanning the artist’s 60-year career.

Düsseldorf-based Hans-Peter Feldmann was a passionate collector of images and ephemera, an original thinker and one of the first conceptual artists. Hans-Peter Feldmann focused on photography and artist books since the late sixties. Often collaging found images from magazines, postcards, books, advertisements, and stamps, Feldman used familiar motifs to explore the boundaries between art and everyday life. Unmade beds, car radios – Feldmann focalized unattended moments for a contemplative narrative based on being rather than acting.

Influenced by the Dadaist, the Situationists, Fluxus and Vienna Actionists, Hans-Peter Feldmann viewed art as an impression rather than the object. Feldmann's practice was defined not by materiality but by ideas. On view are several works from Feldmann’s Time series which began in 1970, which use analogue film rolls to shoot continuously the same place, object, or person. Modest subjects and trivial themes are chronicled frame by frame, recording the passage of time. His methods focused on the sequence rather than a single frame; it was through repetition that ideas became more conscious and deeper insight could be gleaned. His work Beine consists of 30 photographs of women’s legs – where one photograph of a woman’s legs may simply be provocative, 30 photographs pinned together becomes something more. In Alle Kleider einer Frau, 70 pieces of woman’s garment are displayed one photo at a time, the woman hidden, the artist emotionally distant, opening up space for the viewer’s interpretation.

In 2007, Hans-Peter Feldmann returned to painting without assuming the traditional role of the painter. Modifying and appropriating 19th Century paintings sourced from auctions and flea markets, Feldmann would transform classical depictions into post-modern caricatures by adding red noses or smudged lipstick to portraits, tattoos or tan lines to nudes. Feldmann’s work Horizont consists of 11 landscape paintings from various time periods. Differing in size, the pictures are aligned with their horizon line to create a continuous thread and reveal a new genre of landscape. Several paintings on view are suspended from the ceiling, a call back to Lina Bo Bardi’s design for the Museu de Arte de Sao Paolo (1968), this ‘floating installation’ democratizes the experience of the artwork, putting the viewer on equal ground with the paintings. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann spent his career challenging the social role of images and subverting expectations, reframing notions of beauty and representation. Feldmann believed art isn't confined to a gallery or museum but woven into everyday life – his works are a reflection on looking, an ability that every viewer holds.

303 GALLERY

555 W 21 Street, New York, NY 10011

www.303gallery.com

Related Post:

Hans-Peter Feldmann: 100 Years

P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, October 15, 2004 - February 21, 2005

Frank Kunert, Photography & Miniatures: The Best of - About the book The Best of Frank Kunert, Published by Hatje Cantz

The Best of Frank Kunert

Published by Hatje Cantz

June 2025

The Best of Frank Kunert, Hatje Cantz, 2025

Text: Ariadne von Schirach

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert 

Souterrain, 2015 

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert 

Attic Flat, 2007

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert 

Field Office, 2010

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

As the title suggests, this book presents the best photographs of Frank Kunert. The choice must have been difficult! These photographs are taken from three books previously published by Hatje Cantz. 

The German photographer FRANK KUNERT (b. 1963) has made a name for himself in the contemporary art scene thanks to a universe that is both quirky and meticulously crafted. Far from documentary realism or traditional portraiture, Frank Kunert creates miniature surreal models, which he photographs with painstaking precision. Each image is the result of a long manual process, blending dark humor, irony, and absurd poetry.

Frank Kunert

Event Restaurant, 2005

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert

Salvation, 2009

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

...When a church becomes a parking lot...

Frank Kunert

Drive-In, 2012

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert

Golden Goal, 2003

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

Frank Kunert 

A Place in the Sun, 2014

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

The scenes he stages are at once familiar and unsettling. A hotel room with a ski slope as an emergency exit, a balcony facing a brick wall, or a dinner table perched high above a living room on stilts—Kunert’s world defies all logic. He cultivates a distinctly German sense of nonsense, where the banality of everyday life collides with architectural absurdities or surreal situations. This offbeat perspective subtly questions social norms, urban anxieties, and the absurdity of certain conventions.

Frank Kunert 

Auf hohem Niveau, 2008

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

The previous photograph, both restrained in form and disconcerting in content, encapsulates Kunert’s unique aesthetic, composed of visual paradoxes, understated irony, and a subtle poetics of the absurd. By diverting a commonplace architectural element such as a staircase from its intended purpose, he invites reflection on the relationship between cultural institutions and their audiences. The museum—ostensibly a space of openness and cultural exchange—appears here as an inaccessible fortress, deftly alluding to common critiques of the contemporary art world: elitism, insularity, opacity, and a certain detachment from everyday life.

Frank Kunert

Live Broadcast, 2012

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

In Live Broadcast the television is physically connected to the toilet bowl, as if drawing its content directly from it. True to Kunert’s style, this photograph combines precise craftsmanship with a sharp sense of irony. It playfully critiques the quality—or perhaps the emptiness and vulgarity—of modern media consumption. By creating a literal pipeline between waste and entertainment, Frank Kunert blurs the line between functionality and absurdity, challenging viewers to reflect on the content they absorb daily.

Frank Kunert

Menu à deux, 2009

Image courtesy Hatje Cantz

"In Frank Kunert’s Menu à Deux, meanwhile, the V-shaped dining table and perfectly symmetrical place settings imply a (nonexistent) mirror—or perhaps a difficult relationship." notes Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times (June 16, 2011).

Frank Kunert doesn’t just aim to amuse; he unsettles, inviting us to pause and see the world through a different lens. His photographs, though seemingly lighthearted, often reveal a quiet melancholy, or a veiled critique of modern society.

In short, Frank Kunert is a sculptor of absurdity and a photographer of the impossible, whose images, beneath their wry humor, capture the paradoxes of a very real world.

I recommend this book to you.

HATJE CANTZ

www.hatjecantz.com

Daniel Richter @ Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg - "Mit elben Birnen" Exhibition

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg

Through 27 September 2025

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents a new series of paintings by German artist DANIEL RICHTER. Created over the past year, these large-scale works navigate a space between figuration and abstraction, characterised by chaotic entanglements of fragmented bodies. Creature-like forms are depicted against jagged fields of colour in bright, contrasting tones, evoking a sense of rebellious energy and electric vibrancy.

Daniel Richter’s painting has been marked by a continual formal transformation since the beginning of his career. While opaque, monochrome areas of colour characterised Richter’s work of the past few years, the backgrounds of these new, intensely colourful compositions appear torn or singed. At times, the candy-coloured shapes that seem to race across the canvas are delineated by black, dense lines; at others, they seem to detach from the background or erupt across the pictorial space.

In some works, the artist leaves behind traces of his physical presence as visible fingermarks on the canvas, intensifying a heightened sense of primordial energy and unresolved conflict. ‘The dynamic in my work is mainly based on pushing and shoving, or on elements that are being confronted by each other – mingling, pushing, pulling,’ Daniel Richter explains.

The temporal and spatial indeterminacy of scenes refuses to resolve into a coherent time, place, or even pictorial space. The works appear to depict surreal landscapes of the mind or imagination rather than representations of any external world. Colours clash or recede with intense emotional charge, the bold contrasts and abstract patterns recalling the formal vocabulary of Clyfford Still. And yet, despite the underlying violence, the works convey a touching sensuality and beauty that counterbalances their restless energy.

The exhibition’s title references the opening line of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Half of Life, which Daniel Richter cryptically rephrases. The poem is centred around a stark contrast between idealised beauty and a world marked by emptiness. The lines, which sound almost prophetic in today’s political climate, accompanied Daniel Richter during the creation of this series. Hölderlin’s image of creaking weathervanes can be read as a symbol of the fragile, often fractured order of our time.

Friedrich Hölderlin

‘Half of Life’

With its yellow pears

And wild roses everywhere

The shore hangs into the lake,

O gracious swans,

And drunk with kisses

You dip your heads

In the sobering holy water.

Ah, where will I find

Flowers, come winter,

And where the sunshine

And shade of the earth?

Walls stand cold

And speechless, in the wind

The weathervanes creak.

The anarchic humour of his titles is typical of the artist, whose sensibility for the absurd and the drastic is also closely linked to the Hamburg music scene and punk. The city, where Daniel Richter studied under Werner Büttner from 1992 to 1996, has played a pivotal role in his life and career, serving as both a formative backdrop for his artistic development and a long-standing base from which he emerged as one of Germany’s most influential contemporary painters.

Artist Daniel Richter

Born in Eutin, Germany, Daniel Richter lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1992–96 under Werner Büttner, and later worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Richter’s work have been held at Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023); Space K, Seoul (2022); 21er Haus, Vienna (2017); Camden Arts Centre, London (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2016); TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2014); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2011); CAC Málaga and Denver Art Museum (both 2008); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005); and Kunsthalle Kiel; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2001).

Daniel Richter’s works are included in renowned collections worldwide, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg. In 2023, the Oscar-winning director Pepe Danquart released the documentary Daniel Richter, offering a multifaceted insight into the artist’s life and work.

In December, a major retrospective will open at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Schloss Gottorf (until February 2026).

THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG

Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg

ropac.net

Related Posts:

In English

Daniel Richter 

Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023)

Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005)

En Français

Daniel Richter. Drapeau rose – Cheval blanc

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (2005)

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 25 July — 27 September 2025

Eckart Hahn: Silence @ Pablo’s Birthday, New York

Eckart Hahn: Silence 

Pablo’s Birthday, New York

September 5 – October 10, 2025

Pablo’s Birthday presents Silence, an exhibition by German painter ECKART HAHN. After two decades of collaboration, this is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. Hahn’s practice combines elements of narrative and physical tension to explore paradoxical relationships and power dynamics, such as freedom/control, authenticity/artificiality, or isolation/connection. Through the representation of materiality, pressure, gravity, and restriction, he creates a synergy of form and semantics that aid in exploring these binaries. 

“Sight is effortless; sight requires spatial distance; sight can be turned off.”   

– Susan Sontag

Closed eyes link the cast of characters that Eckart Hahn brings to life; apes meditating with apples balanced on their heads and bullets between their toes, while Kermit raises up a skull, and a bird perches on a tower of stacked stones. The profile of a parrot faces us with its eyelids closed. In these contemplative poses, the gesture of looking away evokes both inner stillness and emotional retreat, while the precariousness of balanced objects becomes a metaphor for weight, gravity, strain. In these visual cues, Eckart Hahn uncovers a deeper psychological tension: the burden of moral ambiguity and the delicate negotiation between personal preservation and collective responsibility.

Susan Sontag writes, “In a modern life–a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention–it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.” Susan Sontag emphasizes the human reaction to a constant carousel of thoughts displayed through the everyday, unceasing newsreel. Hahn unveils this tension: When does self-care become neglect? When does self-care shield us not only from harm but from responsibility, connection, and empathy? In reverse, when does a lack of self-care contribute to a deadening of feeling resulting in cynicism or apathy? 

In Hahn’s paintings, we see both a coping mechanism and disengagement, a focus on the self and a shutting out from the world. Hahn raises the question of whether, in shielding ourselves, we risk severing the very qualities that make us human. But Hahn doesn’t offer resolution; rather, he sustains contradiction. He asks us to sit with it, to feel its pull, and its discomfort. 

ECKART HAHN (b. 1971) attended Eberhardt Karl University and the Johannes Gutenberg School in Stuttgart. His works have been represented in solo and group institutional exhibitions and are featured in numerous collections worldwide. Accompanying the publication of his monograph, "Der schwarze Hund trägt bunt" 2018, were three museum exhibitions at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Gladbeck; and Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden. In summer 2025, Eckart Hahn presents a retrospective of over 50 works at the Museum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. He currently lives and works near Stuttgart, Germany.

PABLO'S BIRTHDAY

105 Hudson Street, # 410, New York, NY 10013

pablosbirthday.com

Charline von Heyl @ The George Economou Collection, Marousi / Athens - "The Giddy Road to Ruin" Exhibition

Charline von Heyl 

The Giddy Road to Ruin

The George Economou Collection, Marousi / Athens

14 June 2025 – March 2026

Charline von Heyl 

The Giddy Road to Ruin, 2015

Acrylic on canvas, 62 x 54 inches (157.5 x 137 cm)

© Charline von Heyl

Courtesy of Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Petzel New York

Photo: Butcher Walsh

The George Economou Collection presents The Giddy Road to Ruin, the first survey exhibition by German-American artist CHARLINE VON HEYL (b. 1960) in Greece. 

Across three floors of gallery space, The Giddy Road to Ruin features select works from the last several decades. The earliest is an outstanding painting from the George Economou Collection—an emblematic example of the artist’s practice—Untitled (11/93, I) (1993), while the most recent is her first-ever photographic work, Athens, made in 2024.

The title of the exhibition, The Giddy Road to Ruin, derives from her 2015 painting of the same name and may be interpreted as a reflection of her thinking as well as the nature of painting itself. Displayed at the exhibition’s beginning and considered within the context of Greece’s ancient and modern landscape, the painting takes on greater significance, especially in relation to its presentation alongside the Athens (2024) collages. In these graphic images we experience the echoes and rumblings of both the present and history.

Charline von Heyl is one of the most significant painters of her generation. Educated in Germany in the 1980s and inspired by both senior artists and contemporaries—including Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel, and Michael Krebber, as well as Albert Oehlen, Jutta Koether, and Cosima von Bonin—her work began to carve out new territory, particularly after her move to New York in 1996. While her paintings share the rigor and intensity of theirs, Charline von Heyl’s work eschews irony in favor of a more openly amused humor and a certain nimbleness in the synthesis of mind and hand.

Once in the United States, Charline von Heyl developed a novel, constructive, and strategic approach to creating and solving artistic problems that allows each painting to be “a self-generating machine that finds its own soul.” Her work is neither wholly abstract nor representational but simultaneously both. Her art succeeds by embracing visual and conceptual contradictions, keeping viewers intrigued by the seemingly impossible combinations of subjects, compositions, and styles that result in deeply satisfying yet puzzling works. In many of her paintings, forms appear both in stasis and in flux simultaneously, as evident in works such as Demons Dance Alone (2022) or World Rabbit Clock (2022). Shapes seem to be concurrently at the fore and in the background, as seen in her depiction of bowling pins—a recurring image in her vocabulary, particularly well-represented in two paintings from 2015 on mid-twentieth-century barkcloth fabric that are located on the second floor of the exhibition. To the indiscriminate eye, the contradictory styles in von Heyl’s paintings might seem irreconcilable, yet they all coexist within the singularly coherent universe of her art.

While a series of four densely composed paintings on barkcloth are a through line from the first floor, the appearance of two stolid and iconic works on the second floor signal a change of mood in the exhibition. The heraldic devices in Untitled (11/93, I) (1993) carry ominous, even militaristic overtones, in contrast to the insouciant black-and-white cut-out shapes of Time Waiting (2010), which harken back to mid-century travel advertisements’ filtered interpretation of Cubism. These works stand in stark contrast to the owl paintings from 2020–2021, in which the generally solitary birds—symbols of good fortune and wisdom—gather, against type, into a multitude. This capacious theme, with its potential for great and even adorable variation, offered a lighthearted interlude for Charline von Heyl to paint and for the viewer to enjoy encountering the third floor of the exhibition.

Here the opening salvo is a boldly blue bird in the large, rectangular painting Animal Delinquency (2021). Ultramarine fowl are partially obscured by two smudged-out, variegated forms of two other creatures—owls, perhaps? The collapse of subjects and the spaces they inhabit creates an apprehensive experience. The scroll-like structure of Banish Air from Air (2017) also features bird-like forms flying through interlocking patterns of words, lines, and shapes. At its center is a variation of her repeated, defiant yet playful female power figure, also seen in The Giddy Road to Ruin.

The painting Ninfa (2021) continues the subtle theme of feminine power in her work. Pulchritude is rendered as outlandish, with blue lips and a graceful line suggesting a chin overtaken by a coalescence of black and ochre biomorphic forms resembling birds. The head itself transforms into a dense field of patterns, becoming increasingly abstract. The fifteen diverse, rigorous while and whimsical black-and-white drawings that comprise Drawings Group 2 (2006) elaborate on and connect to the inscriptive elements—sometimes appearing as ideograms or Rorschach-like forms— not unlike Banish Air from Air. They also echo the structure and palette of Athens earlier in the exhibition. Each work on view is replete with such recursive connections, dissonances, and discontinuities—eye-opening and mind-boggling revelations await.

Charline von Heyl: The Giddy Road to Ruin is co-curated by Adam D. Weinberg and Skarlet Smatana, the director of The George Economou Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. A publication with essays by Adam D. Weinberg and artist Helen Marten accompanies the exhibition.

THE GEORGE ECONOMOU COLLECTION

80 Kifissias Ave, 15125 Marousi, Athens

www.thegeorgeeconomoucollection.com

Stephan Balkenhol @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Stephan Balkenhol

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 22 – September 21, 2025

The minimalist sculptures of German artist Stephan Balkenhol radiate a quiet, archaic power. Though his figures often assume formal poses and wear expressionless faces, they are anything but detached. Instead, they convey a restrained yet compelling intensity. Balkenhol’s primary focus is the human condition—whether his subjects are actual people or animals dressed in human clothing, they serve as reflections of humanity. He deliberately preserves the visible marks of his carving tools, giving each figure a tactile roughness that underscores its vulnerability. Sculpted from a single block of wood—typically soft poplar or Douglas fir—each work embraces natural cracks and coarse textures, foregrounding the imperfections that define what it means to be human.

Stephan Balkenhol is widely recognized as one of today’s foremost contemporary sculptors. In the early 1980s, he broke away from the dominant abstract and conceptual art movements of the time, turning instead toward figurative expression. Since then, the human form—and the existential questions it evokes—has remained central to his practice. While clearly representational, Balkenhol’s works resist literal interpretation, inviting viewers into open-ended encounters.

Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957) studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and has served as a professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Karlsruhe since 1992. His sculptures are held in major international collections, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Karlsruhe, Kassel, and Berlin, as well as in Meisenthal, France.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

André Butzer @ Skarstedt, NYC - Chelsea

André Butzer

Skarstedt, New York

Through April 26, 2025

Skarstedt presents the first solo exhibition with acclaimed German painter André Butzer. Made specifically for the gallery’s new Chelsea space, he has created 10 large-scale paintings as well as 15 works on paper.

Since 1994, in direct succession to Georg Baselitz and Albert Oehlen, André Butzer’s fundamental fusion of European Expressionism and American ready-made pop culture, the conceptual repetition and apparent seriality of his iconic characters as well as his insistence on bare human dignity have been testament to his courageous and continuous inquiry into societal contradictions and social non-conformity.

Butzer’s Synthetic Paintings appear to be blasted and contorted, atomized into countless abstract particles. No painting can rely on any prefabricated compositional order. Enormous discharges of colors, forms and patches, ornamental bands, framework and planes—placeless and unstable.

The huge, solitary figures, as austere as ludicrous, are a challenge to our image of man. Their towering, composite bodies are industrialized, permeated by technology, maltreated by devices and pieces of apparatus, distorted, destroyed from within.

But at that precarious moment, in which the human figure is completely negated, dissolved, broken, and hollowed out, André Butzer begins. In the face of absolute annihilation, nothing remains but mere existence. An enduring basis for living. Vibrant and vital. From there, he builds his figures and thus the entire image anew.

For a figure is nothing that ever was a given in painting. Unique and inimitable, it incorporates both creation and destruction, permanent obliteration and renewal. André Butzer decisively realizes the substantial coherence of these opposites. "I want to be right in the middle of these destructive and redemptive contradictions", he says. In every image, opposites such as placing and dispersion, disruption and solidity, affirmation and negation reunite and therefore converge into a balanced, all-encompassing wholeness.

Each painting establishes its own, fragile stance from within itself. The straightening up of the figures, their presence and posture, their foothold and powerless composure, all this corresponds to the pervasive verticality of the canvases like an echo. A painterly totality, in which color transfigures every form and body.

The entire painting becomes a coloristically built “pictorial figure,” which “has no validity outside the picture and which is only potent in this one image and on this specific plane.” A trembling, truthful image of man, made whole again amidst fracturing and dissolving. Just as Butzer’s figures suddenly fit into the image, it is as if, even we, might fit into the world again.

André Butzer confronts our frail existence. His paintings reveal with utmost urgency that a dignified life, the integrity of body and soul, must be preserved not only in painting, but everywhere all at once.

SKARSTEDT NEW YORK - CHELSEA

547 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.skarstedt.com

André Butzer @ Skarstedt, New York, February 13 - April 26, 2025

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin @ Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin 

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

March 30 – June 22, 2025

The Kimbell Art Museum presents the exhibition Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. This exhibition brings together more than seventy paintings and sculptures from the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Germany’s distinguished modern art museum. It traces the German experience in the visual arts from the last years of the German Empire, World War I and the liberal Weimar Republic that followed to the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II. Paintings and sculptures by artists including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, and Christian Schad show how modern art played an important role in the discourse during these critical decades in twentieth-century political history and how politics, at the same time, influenced the visual arts. Most of the works on view in this exhibition have never before been shown in the United States. 

“This is the first special exhibition ever held at the Kimbell devoted to painting and sculpture in Germany during the fraught, tumultuous first half of the twentieth century,” said Eric Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “We are grateful to the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin for the opportunity to provide this experience in Texas.”

The exhibition leads visitors through the great shifts in art and politics that took place between 1910 and 1945 in six thematic sections, beginning with Expressionism. In the first decade of the twentieth century, artists challenged the status quo of German art, painting and sculpting roughly drawn and vividly colored works. The Expressionists’ works were political in their objection to the conservative taste of their times, and specifically that of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Many German Expressionist artists were given prominent places in German museums in the wake of the first World War but were later often banned under Hitler. This gallery includes Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self Portrait with a Girl, 1914-15, and Emil Nolde’s 1909 Pentecost, among paintings by other influential artists.

The next section features the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a movement that typified the modern style of the 1920s. These artists rejected the seemingly crude brushwork and dissonant colors of Expressionism, seeking to adapt to a new post-war social order in the liberal climate of the so-called Weimar Republic, the democratic government that was ushered in at the end of World War I and lasted until Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933. Their paintings were often marked by careful draftsmanship, sober brushwork, and a kind of hyper-realism that gave a modern interpretation of the traditions of German Renaissance art. This section includes works by artists who may be less well-known to American audiences but who have long been celebrated in Germany and recognized by artists and historians worldwide. Among them are Kate Diehn-Bitt, Kurt Günther, Franz Radziwill, and Christian Schad, whose 1928 painting Sonja is among the most famous icons of the movement. 

From this rediscovery of realism, museum visitors move to galleries featuring the International Avant-Gardes that found favor in the 1910s and ‘20s, when modern art from across Europe was exhibited in Germany. At this time, more than ever before, art from abroad was featured in museums and commercial galleries. In this exhibition, portraits of three influential art dealers join works by the foreign artists they promoted: Afred Flechtheim by the painter Otto Dix; Herwarth Walden by the sculptor William Wauer; and Heinrich Thannhauser, in the painting by Lovis Corinth from the Kimbell’s own collection. This section of the exhibition includes works by such European artists as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Oskar Kokoschka, and Marianne von Werefkin. 

The exhibition next reveals ways that Modes of Abstraction entered and influenced German art in the years between the world wars. For example, the Cubism of Picasso, Georges Braque, and Léger exerted a strong influence in Germany, on painters such as Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter, and Georg Muche, whose works are displayed here. Feininger, Klee, and Muche were on the faculty of the Bauhaus, the famed art school, along with Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer, also featured in this section of the exhibition. 

Politics and War demonstrates how artistic movements engaged directly with modern society and, by extension, with political issues. Some artists did so quite explicitly: George Grosz, in his famous 1926 Pillars of Society, blatantly ridiculed the establishment—political, military, and religious. The works in this gallery plot the course of events that led from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to the rise of militant nationalism in the 1930s, to a second world war, and to the Nazi atrocities that shocked nations worldwide. Examples include Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s mournful bronze sculpture Fallen Man, and Horst Strempel’s magnum opus, Night Over Germany, a denunciation of the Nazis’ barbarism in the form of a Christian altarpiece.

The exhibition concludes with an epilogue titled Before and After. This gallery includes works by some artists who had been exiled, who had been labeled as “degenerate,” or who were otherwise grappling with the political and humanitarian realities of post-war Germany, from the point of view of their art before the war and their history in the post-war era. Among the works seen in this concluding chapter of the exhibition are Max Beckmann’s melancholy 1942 Self Portrait in a Bar and Salvador Dalí’s Portrait of Mrs. Isabel Styler-Tas, painted in exile in Beverly Hills, California, in 1945. 

“The works in this exhibition are powerful, masterful,” said George T. M. Shackelford, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “And the stories that they tell about their turbulent times are gripping.” 

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin has been organized by the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in cooperation with the Kimbell Art Museum. The curators of the exhibition are Dieter Scholz, George T. M. Shackelford, and Irina Hiebert Grun.

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945 

Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

The richly illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition is edited by George T. M. Shackelford, Irina Hiebert Grun, and Joachim Jäger, with major contributions by Dieter Scholz, Irina Hiebert Grun, and George T. M. Shackelford, and commentary on each work by a wide variety of German scholars. 

KIMBELL ART MUSEUM

3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth, Texas 76107

kimbellart.org

Updated Post

Thomas Demand @ Taipei Fine Arts Museum - "The Stutter of History" Retrospective Exhibition

Thomas Demand 

The Stutter of History

Taipei Fine Arts Museum

January 18 — May 11, 2025

THOMAS DEMAND 

The Stutter of History - Exhibition Poster

「托瑪斯．德曼：歷史的結舌」展覽主視覺。

Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum

“I guess the core of it is making the world into a model by redoing it and stripping off the anecdotal part, that’s when it becomes an allegory, and the project becomes a metaphor. Making models is a cultural technique—without it we would be blind.”

—Thomas Demand

The retrospective of celebrated German artist Thomas Demand is on view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). The exhibition is co-organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, and TFAM, curated by Douglas Fogle. It brings together nearly 70 of the artist's works from the 1990s to the present, showcasing his 30-year practice at the intersection of sculpture and photography.

Born in Munich in 1964, Thomas Demand studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1987 to 1992, and earned a master's degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1994. Initially, Thomas Demand simply created sculptures with paper and cardboard, while photography originally served as a means to document his works. During the shooting process, he discovered the differences between the physical objects and their flat images captured by the camera lens, leading him to develop a method of constructing objects for the purpose of being photographed. This has subsequently become the primary medium for presenting his creations. Demand reconstructs life-size scenes of seemingly banal images from the mass media using paper and cardboard, and then photograph the scenes to create images similar to the originals. Finally, he destroys the models, leaving behind only large-format photographic prints. In this way, he questions the notion of photography as an absolutely objective or truthful medium and explores the distance between reality and representation. Demand's works have been exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide. He represented Germany at the 26th São Paulo Biennial (2004), and appeared four times at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In light of his love for models and architecture, it is not surprising that Demand has collaborated over the years with various well-known international architects such as David Chipperfield, Rem Koolhaas, and SANAA, on projects ranging from exhibitions and installations to actual architectural building projects.

The topics of Demand's works often come from news photos of notable historical or social incidents, recreating key moments that have influenced Western or even global situations. His early works address moments of German history that he never personally experienced but learned about through images, such as the bomb-damaged room where Hitler narrowly escaped assassination in 1944 (Raum / Room, 1994), and the film archives of the Nazi-supported filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Archiv / Archive, 1995). Additionally, Thomas Demand has reconstructed scenes of major world news events, such as the stack of documents at Donald Trump's press conference before his inauguration as U.S. President in 2017 to prove that he had relinquished control of his businesses (Folders, 2017), the hotel room where the fugitive American National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden originally stayed in Russia (Refuge Series, 2021), the storeroom of the Wildenstein Institute, where 30 paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades were recovered during a police raid (Vault, 2012), and the abandoned control room of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake (Kontrollraum / Control Room, 2011).

Throughout his career, Thomas Demand has been interested in our culture’s production and interpretation of “nature,” as well as the division between the artificial and natural worlds. Using over 270,000 paper leaves, he created Clearing (2003), an idyllic forest scene with sunlight streaming through the canopy, reflecting people's unfounded romantic vision of a pure and pristine nature. His work Grotte / Grotto (2006) was made with 36 tons of cardboard. The artist gathered and studied hundreds of postcards of caves sold in gift shops worldwide and built a life-sized grotto with stalactites accumulated over thousands of years. The final photographic version of Grotto becomes an ideal condensation of our collective impression of a cave. This is the only model among Demand's works that has been preserved and is currently on view at the Prada Foundation in Milan. The wall-covering photographic wallpaper work Hanami (2014), which has been installed across the entrance walls of the TFAM’s exhibition galleries, provides viewers with an immersive experience. By recreating countless cherry blossoms out of paper, Demand invites us to contemplate on the fleeting and cyclical nature of life through their ephemeral bloom.

In 2008, Thomas Demand moved from the monumental to personal and quotidian subjects, creating his Dailies series. The artist still employed the same creative methods, transforming images into paper sculptures and then photographing them. However, this series of images came from mobile phone snapshots of banal scenes he encountered daily, such as an empty yogurt cup with a pink plastic spoon left on a shelf, a bar of soap placed on the edge of a sink, a pile of letters spilling out from under a door, and cups inserted into the holes of a chain link fence. The Dailies series is Demand's attempt at creating an autobiographical narrative using ordinary visual elements, and celebrates the subtle and infinite charm of life's minutiae. These works condense his understanding of history: history is not only composed of grand events worldwide but also includes the mundane matters of our individual lives. In light of the popularization of phone-based photographic technology and our culture’s now obsessive sharing of images on social media, the artist's painstaking reproduction of these poetic if unremarkable moments from his own life in his Dailies also asks us to reflect on the outsized importance that these rapidly produced and disseminated images have taken on in contemporary society.

Thomas Demand has also used stop-motion animation in his work to explore the world of moving images. In Pacific Sun (2012), the artist recreated a piece of surveillance camera footage that went viral on the internet depicting a few moments inside a cruise ship cabin as it was hit by rogue waves from a tropical storm off the coast of New Zealand. In this film we see tables, chairs, lockers, paper plates, computer monitors, and other objects slide back and forth whimsically and erratically. Thomas Demand spent months meticulously recreating these chaotic moments frame by frame with paper and cardboard. In Balloons (2018), a string of balloons tied to a red plastic clothespin drifts slowly across a concrete and brick sidewalk, moved lazily by the wind. Only the clothespin and colorful ribbons are visible on the screen, while the balloons themselves float outside the frame, their looming presence marked only by the shadows cast on the ground, moving gracefully as if dancing to an improvised minuet. Accompanied by swaying tree shadows and occasionally by fallen leaves on the ground, the work captures poetic moments of urban life that are often overlooked and incidental.

In 2011, during his residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Thomas Demand began his Model Studies series. Departing from his technique of sculpturally reconstructing existing images of the world, he turned his lens directly on the preparatory paper models of architects and designers, capturing abstract and fragmented elements within them. Whether it was the provisional maquettes of John Lautner, one of the most influential modernist architects in 20th-century America, those created by contemporary architectural firms like SANAA, or the radical paper dress patterns of the fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa, who was famous for his sculptural designs, these images reveal that the world around us is constructed on a foundation of paper. During his exploration of building environments in the visual world, Demand began using his photographic prints as wallpaper to intervene in white cube spaces, adding a spatial depth to the exhibition of his photographic works, as seen in Cones (2018) and Lockers (2018), which fill the walls of two rooms of the exhibition.

Through the ingenious use of paper as a material and the arrangement of light and shadow, Demand's works initially appear similar to documentary images of the real world, but upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be recreations using paper and cardboard. Based on flat documentary images, Thomas Demand carefully re-construct these scenes out of paper before photographing the models and finally destroying them. Through layers of reproduction and translation between his source images and their final quasi-photographic counterparts, Demand’s ghostly works suggest that even though history lurks in our collective and individual memories in the form of images, there is always a gap in our perception of the so-called truth. Demand's work explores how the fragile texture of paper can become the carrier of images and memories, whether from our daily lives or the larger arc of world historical events. This aspect of Demand’s work highlights the tension between photographic images and the real world while questioning both the inertia of image culture and the paradox of perception.

THOMAS DEMAND (b. 1964, Munich, lives and works in Berlin) attended both the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1987 to 1992 before receiving a master’s degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths’ College in London in 1994. Thomas Demand has shown his work at major museums and galleries worldwide. His solo projects include exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2024); Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (2023); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (2022); Centro Botin, Santander (2021); Garage, Moscow (2021); M Museum, Leuven (2020); Fondazione Prada, Venice (2017, 2007); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2016); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014, 2015); DHC Art Center, Montréal (2013); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2012); the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2012); Kaldor Public Arts Project #25, Sydney (2012); Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2009); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2009); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005); the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2004); and a survey at Fondation Cartier, Paris (2001). He also represented Germany at the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale (2004). His widely acclaimed exhibition “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.,” a collaboration with the filmmaker Alexander Kluge and the stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock, was on view at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2017. His work has been included in four iterations of the Venice Architecture Biennale and was recently featured at the 2nd Chicago Architecture Biennale. His work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. Thomas Demand has also curated several shows, including “L’Image Volée” at Fondazione Prada (Milan, 2016); “Model Studies” (Graham Foundation, Chicago, 2013); “La carte d’après nature” (Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco, (2010); and a contribution to the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, “Common Ground” (2012)

TAPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM — TFAM

No.181, Sec. 3, Zhongshan N. Rd., Zhongshan Dist., Taipei City 104227

www.tfam.museum

Caspar David Friedrich @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC - "The Soul of Nature" Exhibition with Catalogue

Caspar David Friedrich 

The Soul of Nature

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

February 8 - May 11, 2025

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840)

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1817

Oil on canvas, 37 3/8 × 29 1/2 in. (94.8 × 74.8 cm)

Hamburger Kunsthalle, on permanent

loan from the Stiftung Hamburger

Kunstsammlungen, acquired 1970 (HK-5161)

Photo by Elke Walford

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Self-Portrait, 1800

Black chalk on wove paper

16 9/16 x 10 7/8 in. / 42 x 27.6 cm

SMK, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

(KKSgb5006)

Photo credit: Statens Museum for Kunst

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Friedrich’s art presents nature as a site of personal and philosophical discovery. Marshalling the expressive power of perspective, light, color, and atmosphere, the artist created landscapes that articulate a profound connection between the natural world and the inner self, or soul. This imagery encapsulated the newly emerging ideals of European Romanticism, a cultural revolution that championed conceptions of individual perception and feeling that are still vital today.

“The most significant German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich brilliantly illuminates our understanding of the natural world as a spiritual and emotional landscape,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “This very first major retrospective in the United States of Germany’s most beloved painter follows the celebrations of Friedrich’s work in Europe on the occasion of the artist’s 250th birthday in 2024. We are thrilled to collaborate with our German museum colleagues and many other generous lenders on this rare opportunity to reflect on Friedrich’s portrayals of nature and the human condition.”

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which house the most substantial collections of Friedrich’s work in the world. In 2023–24, these museums presented hugely popular exhibitions of Friedrich’s art as part of the artist’s jubilee celebrations in Germany. As a capstone to this series of shows, The Met’s exhibition features unprecedented loans from all three institutions and from more than 30 other public and private lenders in Europe and North America, many never before seen in the United States. Despite Friedrich’s celebrated reputation, there have been only two exhibitions dedicated to his work in the United States: The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the U.S.S.R., held at The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990–91 and featuring 9 paintings and 11 works on paper by Friedrich; and Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers, held at The Met in 2001, which included 7 paintings and 2 works on paper by the artist.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

View of Arkona with Rising Moon, 1805–6

Brown ink and wash, over pencil, on wove paper

24 x 39 3/8 in. / 60.9 x 100 cm

The Albertina Museum, Vienna (17298)

Photo credit: The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840)

Two Men Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1825–30

Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 17 1/4 in. / 34.9 x 43.8 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Wrightsman Fund, 2000 (2000.51)

Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature presents oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches from every phase of the artist’s career, along with select examples by his contemporaries. The selection illuminates Caspar David Friedrich’s development of a symbolic vocabulary of landscape motifs to convey the personal and existential meanings that he discovered in nature. Among the loans that are exhibited for the first time in the United States are Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Hamburger Kunsthalle) and Monk by the Sea (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie), two of Friedrich’s most famous paintings and icons of Romantic art. Many other signature works, such as Dolmen in Autumn (Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), have not been seen in the United States for decades. The exhibition also brings together for the first time all five of the Caspar David Friedrich paintings owned by museums in the United States (The Met, the Kimbell Art Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum), placing these rare American holdings in the broader context of Friedrich’s art. A rich selection of works on paper from domestic and international collections showcases Friedrich’s talents as a draftsman and the centrality of drawing to his creative practice. As a joint project between specialists in paintings and drawings, the exhibition  also considers the ways that the artist worked across media and how different materials and techniques shaped his style.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Castle Ruins at Teplitz, 1828

Watercolor over pencil on wove paper

6 13/16 x 9 ¼ in. / 17.3 x 23.4 cm

Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen 

Dresden (C 1913-33)

Photo credit: © Kupferstich-Kabinett, 

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 

Photo by Herbert Boswank

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

The Evening Star, ca. 1830

Oil on canvas, 13 x 17 13/16 in. (33 x 45.2 cm)

Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe Museum, 

Frankfurt am Main (IV-1950-007)

Photo credit: © Freies Deutsches Hochstift / 

Frankfurter Goethe-Museum

Photo: David Hall

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Cave in the Harz, ca. 1837

Brown ink and wash with pencil on wove paper

13 9/16 x 17 3/16 in. / 34.5 x 43.7 cm

The Royal Danish Collection, Copenhagen (I, 3 a-3)

Photo credit: HM The King's Reference Library, 

The Royal Danish Collection

The exhibition unfolds chronologically and thematically, tracing Friedrich’s portrayal of the landscape of northern and central Europe over his four-decade career, which coincided with pronounced symbolic and physical changes to the land—prompted by the rise of Romantic thought, scientific discoveries about the earth, nascent industrialization, and political upheaval, most notably the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–1815. Each section of the exhibition examines specific landscape motifs and pictorial strategies that defined Friedrich’s art, while highlighting the themes that he explored, among them spirituality and religion; the experience of the infinite and unknowable; the passage of time and mortality; solitude and companionship in nature; the juxtaposition of the familiar and the unknown; and the mixture of beauty and danger that the Romantics called the sublime. As a whole, the exhibition  distills Caspar David Friedrich’s vision of nature and situate his art within the tumultuous politics and vibrant culture of 19th-century German society, illuminating the role of German Romanticism in shaping modern perceptions of the natural world.

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature is co-curated by Alison Hokanson (Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Met), and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein (Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Met).

Caspar David Friedrich 

The Soul of Nature

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. It features essays by Dr. Hokanson and Dr. Seidenstein; Professor Joseph Leo Koerner, Harvard University; and Professor Cordula Grewe, Indiana University; in addition to contributions from other international scholars. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art it is distributed by Yale University Press.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 199

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org