Persistance of Painting

Yasmin Alt, Felix Becker, Helen von Burg, Christian Henkel, Laura Mietrup, Angelika Schori, Herbert Warmuth, Hendrik Zimmer

Presented in collaboration with Galerie Heike Strelow

For over a century, painting has been repeatedly declared dead - as an outdated medium in a world shaped by digitalization, conceptual art and algorithmic image production. But instead of disappearing, it continuously changes: interrupting, questioning and reinventing. The exhibition Persistence of Painting is dedicated to precisely this astonishing resilience of painting and asks what of its infinite potential it can unfold in the 21st century. With works by Yasmin Alt, Felix Becker, Helen von Burg, Christian Henkel, Laura Mietrup, Angelika Schori, Herbert Warmuth and Hendrik Zimmer, the exhibition presents eight international positions that impressively demonstrate the diversity of contemporary painting strategies. Some artists reflect on the history and materiality of the medium - image carrier, pigment, gesture - while others integrate digital techniques or dissolve the classic panel painting into installative contexts. Some even understand painting as a spatial practice or performative action in space. In short: Painting does not present itself here as a nostalgic medium of retreat, but as a dynamic field that absorbs and integrates other media and at the same time asserts its own irreplaceable language. Or as David Joselit (Prof. Art History, Harvard University) writes: "Painting persists not because it resists the new, but because it absorbs it."