Long opening hours – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm
Goethestraße 2/3

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present Rosa See, a solo exhibition of Tal R and the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery at Goethestraße 2/3, in Berlin.

Presenting a new body of work inspired by a trip to Iceland, Rosa See delves viewers into Copenhagen-based artist Tal R’s rich visual lexicon whilst probing the boundaries of representation itself. In these compositions – including drawings created en plein air and paintings developed in the studio – the artist depicts Icelandic lakes in vivid, non-naturalistic colour. The landscapes slip in and out of abstraction, suggesting a universe of luminous colours, exuberant patterns and palpable rhythm.

Depicted from various vantage points, Tal R’s lakes resemble amoebic forms which surge toward the viewer and push against the broad, curving shorelines that surround them. Brightly coloured mounds conjure mountain ranges, while globular clouds deliver rainfall in thick, agitated downward strokes. Elsewhere, bouncing lines suggest ripples in the water’s undulating surface, while minimally delineated pebbles, plants and spruces decorate the rocky shore. Tal R’s lakes fluctuate in colour; bright coral waters give way to deeper fuchsia and more sinister mulberry tones, in turn speaking to the uncanny undercurrent beneath these pictures. Deceptively simple and formally reduced, the artist’s forms are nonetheless burgeoning with potential, restlessly redefining themselves as they summon a vision of nature in constant flux.

Long opening hour – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm
Bleibtreustraße 45 & 15/16

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present Dark Yet, an exhibition of new works by Sean Scully in the gallery spaces at Bleibtreustraße 45 and Bleibtreustraße 15/16, in Berlin. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Internationally recognised as one of the most important painters of his generation, Scully has formulated his evolving definition of contemporary abstraction through painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture over the past five decades. Often using simple shapes to structure his works, the artist fuses personal influences with European tradition and American abstraction, grounding vast scale and gesture with visual delicacy and a sense of vulnerability. Comprising new paintings, drawings and aquatints, the exhibition presents works from important series including ‘Wall of Light’ which has its origins in a watercolour from the 1980s and ‘Landlines’, ongoing since the late 1990s. Also included are more recently initiated hybrids of these, such as the ‘Wall Landlines’ and ‘Nets and Cages’.

Scully’s works draw directly from experience and nature, as much as from a sensitive receptivity for places, stories, human vulnerability, emotional nuances and vibrations of light. Questioning the prerequisites of abstraction – the aesthetics of pure form, pure surface and pure colour – the artist emphasises the intrinsic value of artistic means which lies at the very centre of his work.

Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm
Potsdamer Straße 77-87

Talk Mark Grotjahn with Klaus Biesenbach at Neue Nationalgalerie
25 APR 2024, 5 pm

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present Kitchen Drawings an exhibition of large-scale butterfly drawings by Mark Grotjahn and the artist’s inaugural solo presentation with the gallery, at Potsdamer Straße 77-87, in Berlin.

Over the course of three decades, Mark Grotjahn has produced a diverse oeuvre which pushes the boundaries of visual language. Encompassing painting, drawing and sculpture, his multimedia practice foregrounds the tensions and intersections between the abstract and figurative divide. The artist works in distinctive series with a meticulous, almost obsessive drive. Treading the line between geometry and gesture, Grotjahn has developed a unique pictorial lexicon that is at once idiosyncratic and continually evolving. Since his initial ‘Sign Exchange’ project in the 1990s, the artist has gone on to create his renowned ongoing series of ‘Butterfly’ paintings, amongst several other significant bodies of works, with ‘50 Kitchens’, which was first shown at LACMA in 2018 amongst these.

The Kitchen Drawings originate from the „Butterfly“ compositions, which Grotjahn has made since 2002. Conceived as one work 50 Kitchens originated from a single composition which was done to hang in Grotjahn’s kitchen at his home, drawn in black and cream pencil on a sheet, the subsequent works in the series followed on one from one another in chromatic pairs. Hung precisely to the artist’s specifications, they form a prismatic display. Impossible to view at once at any given moment, the works’ appearance shifts and changes. In the resulting multiple points of view through space, as well as in motion, the different serial elements play off one another.