Every painting is the greatest enemy of another, as is commonly said among painters. But one could just as rightly claim that they need each other—and only the view through the time reveals the bigger picture. In the exhibition Entre Nous Galerie Georg Nothelfer, for the first time, shows works by the Berlin female painter Toni Mauersberg (b. 1989). Her combination of non-figurative paintings with portraits brings both of their “madeness” out of mere colour into view and at the same time expands their interpretative potential: In symbolic and art-historical aspects, this creates new connections between expressions, colours, forms and painting manners. The dialogue between the paintings is intended to open up the viewer’s own ways to decipher seemingly hidden rules within images and examine the readability of abstract painting as a complex pictorial language—whose origins also lie in the search for new forms of spirituality and liberation.

At the interface between quotation and further development, Finja Sander and Daniel Schaal create an open-ended review with INVENTORY that focuses on the art production of European and North American post-war modernism. In times of ever-increasing political crises, it is a central concern of both artists to approach works and ideas of the equally crisis-ridden postwar era and to make them fruitful for contemporary modes of art production. To this end, Schaal and Sander examined the collection of Galerie Georg Nothelfer and looked for works that convey different ways of dealing artistically with the concept of the state of emergency. Bringing those works into the gallery space, subjecting them to a catchy appraisal, re-contextualizing them and ultimately reactivating them, is thus the central moment of the second collaboration between archiv SANDER | SCHAAL and Galerie Georg Nothelfer.

In individual undertakings, such as for the current exhibition INVENTORY, Sander and Schaal take their different ways of working and thinking as an opportunity to create joint works that connect the individual approaches in perspective and allow them to grow. 

From performative gatherings that are further developed into installation-based structures, they repeatedly test anew the possibility of collaboration between seemingly incompatible forms of work.

After an intensive working process lasting several weeks in the gallery space and in public, the newly created works by Sander and Schaal are integrated into the fluid exhibition concept. While the provisionally laid blue PVC tarpaulin initially served as pragmatic protection for the gallery floor, Sander and Schaal now use it as part of their series of works “Staring, into Everything”. This series focuses above all on the subject of looking at something, of immersing oneself in something.

Sander and Schaal stage themselves as anonymous recipients. At the same time, they seem to almost dissolve in the previously made digital reproductions of the historical works and give up their independence.