The „Poesie der Ferne“ (poetry of the faraway) that we find in Mathias Roloff's landscape works arises from the sensitive coordination of partly luminous, partly pastel muted color fields and their dramaturgical intersection with lines, planes, paths. It is about the horizon and the appeal to our gaze through the organic space stretching into the distance. Developed from color and conceived from the abstract, the landscapes oscillate between dissolution and emergence and play with the fantasy of surreal or fantastic imagination. The artist describes his paintings as “timeless refuges with subtle references to human civilization. They follow the longing for seclusion and inspire reflection and self-awareness”. 

During his studies at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he graduated in 2006, Mathias Roloff studied Flemish-Dutch landscape and still life painting from the 16th century, Mannerism and Paul Klee's theory on the abstraction of color fields and magic squares. Paintings such as “Der Übergang” (2021), “Morgendliche Träumerei” (2022) and “Stiller Pfad über die Anhöhe” (2024) show how originally he creates independent and memorable pictorial worlds with these painting traditions behind him. They seem tailor-made for new myths between reality and dream. 

In the Berlin Salon, Roloff is showing the group of works entitled “Evolution of Urbanity”, in which individual trees or groups of trees in photographs of Berlin streets and public squares have been separated from the urban background. The artist isolates the characteristic appearance of the trees by painting over and scratching out the surroundings. The result is “tree portraits”. We have never and will never be able to see our city trees like this: against the expanse of an open sky. He transforms these silent witnesses of the urban world, to which attention is rarely paid, into new fantastic environments. For example, who knows the sycamore at Ku'damm no. 228, central island? We will go in search of it! 

Mathias Roloff was born in Berlin-Pankow in 1979. Since 2000 he has studied painting and graphics at the Berlin University of the Arts, graduating as a master student in 2006 under Volker Stelzmann. Since 2000 he has been studying and working in Italy (Rome, Naples, Florence, Prato) and has presented his work at national and international exhibitions, including in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt/Main, Halle, Munich, Naples, Palermo, Poznan, Rome and Washington. In 2002 he worked as an assistant stage designer at the Berlin State Opera. Mathias Roloff has been a member of the cultural advisory board of the Lichtenberg district office in Berlin since 2017, where he advises the district office on the development of the district's art and cultural scene, is a member of the jury for the district cultural fund, realizes initiatives in the areas of art in public space and cultural education and urban development. His works can be found in the collections of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, Gerhart Hauptmann Museum Erkner, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt/M and Leipzig, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar, among others.

Letizia Werth is interested in drawing and its materiality as well as in the relationship between drawing and other media such as photography and video. Under the title "Shadow Flowers", she summarises a series of monochrome works in which she transforms images of found anonymous — "lost" — photographs from private living spaces onto canvas in graphite and ink. In the process of leaving the photographic model, categories such as space, time, fiction and reality come to light in all their fragility. 
"Drawing is an immediate process of assimilation and digestion [...]. It is comparable to the flow of air when breathing in and out, pausing and letting go, and that is exactly how I stop time for a few moments and move into new pictorial worlds." Letizia Werth has explored the influence of various media on perception, from photography and video to X-rays and séances. The Shadow Flowers blur the boundaries between the spiritual and the physical, reality and imagination. On the one hand, we know that real authors, times and places of origin exist, but these are forever unknown, forgotten, erased. At the same time, what remains comes to the fore: an already haunting mood back then or a mysterious impression of light and shadow, which perhaps touches us precisely because it took place in the world of the everyday — in a quiet living room, looking at a window dazzling in the backlight or at potted plants on a balcony — somewhere — sometime. Where the scenes are turned into negatives, and graphite and ink condense dust-like on the surface of the picture, there is an echo of the uncanny, the mysterious. Whoever took these photos must have been touched by something that was worth capturing. Pausing between fading and emerging, remembering and forgetting, these works demonstrate the artist's sensitivity to the poetry of temporality and the intensity of the unique yet fleeting moment.

Letizia Werth lives and works in Vienna and holds a Diploma Degree from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Her work has been honoured with numerous grants and prizes, most recently the Martin Rainer Prize 2024 and the Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder 2024 residency in Trondheim Norway. Among recent exhibitions can be listed: Bildraum 07 Vienna (solo), C.A.Contemporary Vienna (solo), Drawing now fair Paris (solo), Kunsthalle West Lana Italy, Museion Bolzano Italy, Kunstforum Montafon Austria, MIET Thessaloniki Greece, Kunstforum Unterland Neumarkt Italy (solo), 21er Haus Vienna. Her works are represented in the Austrian Federal Collection (Artothek des Bundes), Collection of the City of Vienna (Sammlung Wien Museum), Collection of the Province of South Tyrol, Collection ÖBV Vienna, Collection of the City of Attnang-Puchheim, Collection Parkhotel Laurin, Collection Raiffeisen Landesbank South Tyrol, among others.

The illusionistic power inherent in the works of Thomas Kleemann allows spaces made up of architectural and landscape elements to emerge before the eyes of the beholder. Formulated in a polyperspective and three-dimensional manner, often built up with silicon carbide and pasty binder paint, they almost appear walkable and touchable: tunnels, stairs, ruins, walls, in between colored areas of light yellow, cobalt blue or red-orange, then a shore, a cliff. The meaning of these things, or: witnesses of the visible world, remains enigmatic and feeds our imagination. This makes Kleemann's pictorial worlds autonomous and inexhaustible. Resisting the separation of abstraction and realism, the artist follows the approach of thinking everything in terms of painting, that is, developing pictorial spaces out of the inherent logic of form and color. For the viewer, both self-sufficient space and time are opened up into which he can enter. — What is behind the surface of reality? Nothing maybe. Maybe everything.

Thomas Kleemann, born in Geesthacht in 1954, completed his studies at the Berlin University of the Arts as a master student under Johannes Geccelli. In 1983 he received a scholarship from the German Academy in Rome Villa Massimo, Casa Baldi, and from 1986 to 1988 the Karl-Hofer-Gesellschaft. He has been a freelance artist since 1985 and lives and works in Berlin and Melz/ Müritz. Kleemann has numerous exhibitions in well-known art associations, galleries and museums in Berlin, Hamburg, Potsdam, Düsseldorf, Saarbrücken, Mannheim, Dresden, Kiel, Munich, among others, e.g. solo exhibitions in the Ostholstein Museum Eutin, Kulturforum Villa Oppenheim Berlin or Rosenhang Museum Weilburg. His works can be found in public and private collections in over 20 countries, including the Berlinische Galerie, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Daimler Art Collection Berlin, the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Culture and the Bürgergalerie in Kiel.

If works of art had a smile, it would often be a Sibyllic one. Sibyls, the seers of ancient Greek mythology, only answered the questions about the weal and woe of fate with hints or riddles and sometimes dismissed their guests with the ambiguity of a mere smile. Her profession was no  clarification or explanation. Rather, they handed the responsibility of thinking and interpreting directly (like a mirror?) back to those seeking advice.
 
The reference to this ancient motif emphasizes an essential common endeavor of the two artists in the exhibition, namely raising questions or not allowing them to rest, i.e. stimulating the desire to ask questions instead of answering them, combined with the fascination for everything mysterious , ambiguous, absurd in the being and thinking of man.

The experimental film artist and painter C.D. Aschaffenburg (*1953) realizes this idea in a special combination of contemporary magic realism and experiments in the field of expanded painting. His condensed pictorial compositions, linked here and there with quotations from art history from ancient mythology to classical modernism, unfold ambiguous worlds full of fantasy, wit and irony.

The paintings by the artist Maria Wirth (*1987) are inspired by ancient mythologies and surrealistic ideas, but always circling the border between abstraction and representation, confronted with substances of an own "logic" such as shellac, glue, ash and plant materials. Femininity, corporeality, intimacy and crossing over human(istic) and animal identity categories are among the central themes of her artistic work.

Every smile is a possible re-enchantment of the world.
Every smile is seduction and at the same time wanting to be seduced.
Every smile is a proof of the irredeemability of the hope for the unequivocal truth.
Every work of art is a potential smile.

With Manfred Carpentier, Michael Dressel and Dieter Matthes, three personalities meet in the exhibition who are also privately on friendly terms. Their photographs share an interest in people, especially people in the big cities of the world. What sets them apart is how they make us perceive the world in their images. Their photographic concepts cover a broad spectrum between inwardness, Street Photography and an idea of people and urban space as an artistic entity.

From 2010 to 2018 Manfred Carpentier, born in 1954 in Gerolstein (Eifel), managed the Carpentier Gallery, raum für kunst in Berlin-Charlottenburg with a focus on Berlin photographers and Berlin-specific topics. The gallery was an important hub for the photography scene in that city and beyond. Carpentier's own photographic work spans genres such as landscape, still life, nude and portrait. In his series "Selfies" he makes himself a model. The expressive portraits, which are created using a remote shutter release, appear like stills of an uncompromising self-questioning. Against a black background, faces fan out into multiple identities. If you follow their titles, the portraits appear like studies of human states: "Guessing", "Screaming", "Being amazed" - and always the question: who am I? Carpentier dissolves the answer into fragments of a movement, almost as if the photographer were dissecting himself with his camera. He is alone, no second person in the room. I and I. By superimposing several results of a shooting, images are created that are reminiscent of the painter Francis Bacon. In his "Expressionism" series, Manfred Carpentier interprets texts by the German poets Jakob von Hoddis and August Stramm. His photomontages seem just as fragmented and irritating as their expressionist poems. They consist of motifs from open source images from the web and our own photographs. In this “eclecticism” of images that fluctuate freely on the internet and his own photographs, the fragmentary nature of the “Selfies” returns. In both series there is also a reference to the over-complexity of the digital age with its unmanageably large number of identities and “images”. And it is also about criticism: "Every day," according to Carpentier, "billions of selfies buzz through the networks sterilized from everything social, with the result of a global, psychosocial neglect".

Michael Dressel has appeared several times in Brennpunkt (most recently no. 1/2022). His photo book “Los(t) Angeles” was published in November 2021 together with an exhibition at Rheinsberg Castle (until May 15, 2022). In June 2022 his photographs will be on view in a "Hollywood" exhibition at the Helmut Newton Foundation. This growing public presence is a long overdue answer to a special German-American artist biography and the path of an unmistakable street photographer. Born in East Berlin in 1958, stage designer, arrested trying to escape over the Wall and imprisoned for two years in a Stasi prison, Michael Dressel found his way to Los Angeles at the age of 27. The city became his second home. For years, in which he worked as a sound editor in numerous well-known Hollywood films, he photographed people on the city streets: bizarre appearances, some of them homeless, confused and aggressive people. Michael Dressel's approach is the special empathy and eye level he brings to the protagonists of his recordings. A tension that is difficult to classify between insecurity, yes, alienation and at the same time the feeling of being close to these people on the fringes of society, of recognizing their dignity - this is what makes his work so fascinating. Despite the lack of taboos in recording poverty, decay and social marginalization, they still illuminate something completely different: something that connects us all. In an interview with F. Scott Hess, Dressel says, “I believe in magic, the magic that comes from pointing a camera at life and freezing a few hundredths of a second into an image. After that, the image turns into something that conveys what I think and feel about this world. This magic enables me to photograph myself in this world.” (quoted from Los(t) Angeles. Michael Dressel, Gingko Press/ Hartmann Books 2021, p.167)

Dieter Matthes, born in West Berlin in 1952, received his doctorate in human medicine from the Free University of Berlin and worked for nine years as a specialist in internal medicine and classical homeopathy. In 1970 he began to deal intensively with the medium of photography. He realized numerous publications in photo magazines such as Photographie, Foto-Magazin, Olympus Magazin and Brennpunkt and received awards at international photo salons. From 1989 Dieter Matthes concentrated his professional focus on photography, initially as a journalist with assignments for Stern, ZEIT-Magazin, FAZ-Magazine, GEO-Magazine, Focus, Forbes and others. For the magazine GLOBO he accompanied reports all over the world, including about New York, Montevideo, Guadeloupe, Eastern Orient Express and Bangkok. In addition to other projects, between 1995 and 2000 he was one of the main authors of the “Blickwinkel” column in the Berliner Tagesspiegel. His “Metropolis” series appears like a kind of international character study of large cities: a study of concrete, steel and glass, of visual axes fleeing towards the sky and a living space that consists almost entirely of architecture. In a world where there is nowhere to put your feet on the ground, people seem small and exposed. Dieter Matthes often leaves them in their anonymous space. However, there are also shots in which the protagonists seem to establish an emotional connection with him: an intense gaze, a fleeting touch, a kissing couple, a child watching the photographer. Especially the series "Childhoods" looks for such moments. Dieter Matthes' pictures retain a standpoint of quiet contemplation. In this way, they sometimes succeed in making the coexistence of city and people perceptible as an artistic structure, a composition that is coordinated with one another.

An article on the exhibition will be published in brennpunkt. Magazine for photography, issue no. 02/22 (April-June).

Whether painting, ink drawing on paper, installation or film, Maryam Motallebzadeh’s works of art can be understood as a kind of contemporary witnesses - created in the awareness of specific times in life and the influence of specific social and political circumstances that influence the artist's perception and thinking. This is one of the reasons why traveling and encounters with other cultures have always been an important source of inspiration for finding artistic themes.

The exhibitions of the native Iranian often have the character of rooms that are filled, like diaries, with notes and with traces of thoughts, feelings and experiences from an eventful life. The artist, standing between Orient and Occident, has dealt intensively with topics such as home, identity, language and the relationship between I and nature.

The exhibition „Vom Wind getragen“ (engl. “Carried by the Wind”) is dedicated to the theme of fate and brings together works that are formally characterized by a particular lightness and dynamism. But also here one can quickly discover unsettling aspects, be it where passionately spread red attacks soft white surfaces, be it where the motif of the veil opens up a complex field of meaning between hiding and uncovering, alienation and intimacy, rejection and temptation. For example, in the installation „Hinter dem Schleier“ (“Behind the Veil”), Maryam Motallebzadeh works with the symbolism that this motif possessed in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. At that time the veil stood for the dividing line between life and death, between delusion and knowledge, death and rebirth.

Some of the works shown in the exhibition were created during the Corona pandemic and emphasize the current importance of questions about transience, uncertainty and, last but not least: love.

Corona Intra Views 

21.05. - 19.06.2020

The exhibition brings together seventeen artists of very different origins, careers, phases of life, questions and working styles. The central theme of the exhibition is on the one hand the corona pandemic: an existential, exceptional global situation in life and work, which entails and entailed for artists as well as for everybody else both connecting and individually differentiated experiences. However, this only applies in a very broad sense, because what makes this artistic encounter even more visible is the artist's sensorium for the meanings between the lines, for the free spirit, the wit as well as for the detail and the critical view from a distance.

Corporeality, in its diversity of expressive values and types, as well as its sensitivity to any deformation, is a leading source of works that Maria Wirth presents in the exhibition. They show bodies and figurative constellations that are fragmented, caught in alien postures, sometimes naked and distorted, posing or dancing, and always fragile. What connects the works in their content, are their hermetic references to motifs from ancient mythologies and philosophical discourses that are interested in all faces of passion, the search for the self and the zones of indeterminacy existence has. 

The German philosopher Hermann Schmitz said that art is "the result of an encounter of the body with the feelings". In this sense, the figures set in powerful color spaces are seen as visible counterparts of realities of the emotional and thought-life. Here corporeality proves to be something permeated by the mind and the emotional life, and on the contrary, spirit and feeling show themselves as something that does not exist without corporeality. 

Figures as Ornaments: bodies that become ornament-like formations, ornamental structures that grow into expressive bodies - animals, humans, intermediate beings. A changing between line, form and a world of figures metaphysically with metaphysical drive.

The exhibition is based on a series of works by the artist Maria Wirth (* 1987 Berlin), which since 2018 has been characterized by the deconstruction and formal distortion of the human and, again and again, animal body in communication with rhythms of ornamental or abstract organic forms. The series is about the moment in which line and form turn into suggestions of movement, impressions of feeling and also synaesthetic characters: it is about becoming Gestalt (form) and dissolution of it. From a philosophical perspective, the workseries is a critical reflection on the unity and consistency of identity and meaning.

As a guest artist we welcome the Iranian Mohsen Tighbakhsh alias Tiba (* 1968 Tehran). His painting grounds are hand-woven carpets mainly from Iran but also from other countries such as Turkey, Greece and North Africa. They bear witness to ancient life forms and, depending on their origin, have special colors, structures, materials and age. Under Tiba's hands, also a master of weaving techniques and virtuoso tattoo artist, spiral-contoured figures emerge on these rare rugs, breaking through the rough, haptic character of the background with colorful radiance and lightness of form. Each motif finds its balance in a combination of figuration and abstraction.

UnMaking Characters. Since modern times, the question of the "I" has been the point of departure for the success of one's life - We are made and we are making characters. 

 In this exhibition, Sara Assadi (Iran), Maria Wirth (Germany) and Marek Benczewski (Poland) are inspired by the meaning complexity of the English word character to reflect contemporary ideas and experiences of the self through artistic means. The self as a "character" is personality, is an individual psyche, is expression, is imperative. It is a process that is both made and self-creating. 

 To make this visible, the three artists experiment with "UnMaking," that is, the deconstruction of characters. The content of her work arises from the dissolution, the unbundling of clear roles, forms and ideas.