2 MAY until 21 JUN 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

2 MAY until 21 JUN 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

carlier | gebauer, Berlin is pleased to present Surrounding You: Part II, a group exhibition featuring works by Anna Bella Geiger, Paul Graham, Alexandra Grant, Asta Gröting, Pakui Hardware, Paul Pfeiffer, Laure Prouvost, and Ian Waelder.

This exhibition is the second chapter in an evolving curatorial project, unfolding in dialogue with the gallery’s ongoing program. Like a thread unraveling from a spool, Surrounding You: Part II expands outward, drawing together multiple viewpoints on how artists engage with their environment. The works resonate as individual pulses within a shared current, revealing a field of interwoven perspectives where each contribution stands as both a personal gesture and a connective strand, proposing ways to see, feel, and situate ourselves within shifting realities.

In Paul Graham’s Agfa Agfacolor XRS400 (New Europe) 1989, abstraction gives way to recognition since what first appears as a pattern of colors unveils itself as a detail of film grain. By focusing so tightly on the medium, Graham exposes the physical architecture behind image-making, hovering between what we perceive and what remains unseen. The piece becomes an invitation to look slowly, to question  the materiality that underpins visual experience. The simplicity of form contradicts the complexity of the act of seeing and we are reminded of what is revealed, what is obscured, and what persists. In the same token, Paul Pfeiffer excavates by exposing the ghost in the machine of image culture through a split, mirrored, and alien rendered Michael Jackson, nearly unrecognizable, looping on a LCD screen in a monstrous, glitchy, hypnotic dance. The title itself (Live Evil), a palindrome, mirrors his aesthetic strategy: reflection as mutation. Through repetition, the familiar turns estranged and the stripping of the spectacle, its seductive veneer, reveals a hollow core where identity flickers and entertainment becomes a site of existential disquiet.

Through segmented canvases and layered references, Anna Bella Geiger examines how fragmented knowledge can be reassembled. The painting that is shown in this context opens onto a complex expanse: elements recall Baroque theatricality while maintaining a minimalist restraint, a rust-toned patina suggests time’s wear, while aerial imagery implies cartographic or emotional landscapes. Geiger’s work resists fixed interpretation, offering instead a map of associations that   challenges how visual language constructs meaning, territory, and memory. The latter, in the case of Ian Waelder’s work, inspired by his grandfather (a German pianist who fled Nazi Germany), becomes both a tribute and an inquiry. A clay nose affixed at the artist’s height nods to inherited identity and the act of remembrance while the upright structure mimics a piano’s silhouette. Waelder’s practice is diaristic and reality based yet abstract, layering biography with metaphor. This work invites viewers into a quiet procession around its form, revealing fragments of a story half-told that explores the weight of history, the echo of family, and the fragile continuity of cultural memory.

Asta Gröting´s Blade of Grass hanged beside a black glass block supported by an amber colored organic form, presents an interface between nature and human intervention. The work references Kubrick’s 2001 monolith reimagined: not as alien artifact, but as a botanical marvel since it highlights grass’s evolutionary adaptability,  genomic richness, and structural genius. Gröting’s work amplifies this complexity, transforming the mundane and the overlooked intelligence of plant life into monument. Similarly, the transformation of the ordinary into something extraordinary can be seen in Alexandra Grant’s wire constellation of poet Wisława Szymborska’s words, which forms an ephemeral matrix that casts delicate shadows on the background with the help of light. Built from the repeated phrase ‘I prefer,’ the work materializes a branching process of choices that ultimately shapes the poet’s identity when language becomes visible and its resonance lingers before us. While the sculptural lines evoke a clear sense of personality, the title of the work (Possibilities) also reminds us that these choices could be possibilities, like shadows, that can shift with time and perspective.

Pakui Hardware’s sculptural works explore the lasting scars of ecological and social trauma through two series. On the one hand, Heat Treated reflects on the toxic legacy of Sosnowsky’s hogweed which leaves blistering marks on bodies through pieces that resemble futuristic fossils, embedded with traces of this plant, medical tools, and industrial waste beneath a molten surface. And, on the other hand, in Inflammation, glass hot spots trace nerve-like forms allude to how systemic injustice and historical oppression manifest as chronic pain inscribed in the body over time.

In a related but distinct approach, Laure Prouvost’s sculpture Mouth Branch features a twig extending from the wall with human parts, subtly echoing the idea of human-plant entanglement within a shared ecological space. The central piece of this exhibition, Prouvost´s VR headset, emerges from a basket of brittle branches, suggesting a porous boundary between the digital and the organic, creating a surreal ecosystem that embodies the philosophy of the project. Like her bird sculptures, it embodies fluidity, navigates language, gesture, and dream, and nothing remains fixed, everything is becoming.

Together, the works in Surrounding You: Part II construct a layered field of relations building up a space where ideas are not static but in motion, meaning dissolves and reconstitutes through perception and everyone is invited to become part of a shifting network.

Alexandra Grant (1973) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin; Anna Bella Geiger (1933) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro; Paul Graham (1956) lives and works in New York; Asta Gröting (b. 1961, Herford) lives and works in Berlin; Pakui Hardware (b. 1977 and 1984, Lithuania) live and work in Vilnius; Paul Pfeiffer (1966) lives and works in New York; Laure Prouvost lives and works in Brussels; Ian Waelder (b. Madrid, 1993) lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and Mallorca

2 MAY until 21 JUN 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to announce Here Be Dragons, the first solo exhibition by Leonor Serrano Rivas at the gallery in Berlin, opening on Friday, 2 May 2025, 6 – 9 pm, on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin.

We embark on a grand voyage of sorts when ascending the stairs to Here Be Dragons by Leonor Serrano Rivas. We are first met by a whirlpool of material bodies that both flush us into the bowels of earth and heed us under the moonlight sky. These bodies lure us into their stream, like summoners of ancient magic, and following the curved mirror screen at the heart of the gallery, we enter their tempest.

A large photographic film, the exhibition’s eponymous centrepiece, dresses the inside of the curve. Exposure to the sun has etched spectral compositions of flowers and leaves onto its  surface. The analogue process of layering 16mm black and white film with organic material has allowed chemical residues and a touch of unexpected color to impregnate the film, as if the convergence of nature’s particles and photographic technology form a new performative alliance. On view in an adjacent space, the 16mm film is turned into a panoramic motion picture that similar to a lizard’s tail curls around us, silently caressing us with its chromatic skin.

In her first exhibition in Berlin, Serrano Rivas presents four bodies of works that take their beginning in the natural world, among the life of plants. They soon reveal themselves as the muses of earth history and the carriers of the non-heroic stories of humans and nonhumans. They engage the ongoing inquiries of Serrano Rivas, in which she explores the inherent theatricality of the ways we coexist and produce knowledge. In her work, she interlaces a multitude of scientific, historic, and literary sources, among others, and in this exhibition in particular, the thoughts of Donna Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, Emanuele Coccia and the Mundus Subterraneus by Renaissance polymath Athanasius Kircher. Here, Serrano Rivas’ works plot out like the sites on one of Kircher’s magia naturalis maps, a bag of stars, steering us to uncharted territories and the waters of livable futures.

Inside the photographic coil in the middle of the gallery, a cabinet forest of metal structures holds the mutated figures of crops and plants. These hybrid blooms, Where We Expect to Find Flowers (2025), are covered in coats of crystals, which were deposited in a chemical reaction with vegetable acids in an electrolytic bath. On elongated wires, they waver quietly like performers in waiting or, underwater volcanoes in sudden moments of  elegant rupture. Joined on an ocean floor, a sea of earth, they form pockets of stories, gathered like plant seeds bound to sow new worlds.

The exhibition’s watercourse further settles in the gallery’s periphery in three looming  jacquard tapestries. Their motifs are translated stills from the video work Breathings of the Moon (2022) by Serrano Rivas and artist collaborator Diego Delas, in which the artists recreated an underwater world by means of magnets, the sediments of colorful particles, and an artificial seabed. In its woven renditions, Patrones de ritmo (2024–), the overlapping of wefts, the alteration of the threaded order, and the open knots of the jacquard technique mimic the rhythmic patterns of water’s breathing of flood and ebb, like the movement of  fluids within the body. For Serrano Rivas, giving agency to water shows the flow between the world’s micro and macro levels and translating between mediums introduce new images and new energies.

On the outer rim of the gallery, sculptures of wood and glass respire. These Carcasses (2019–) are both fluid and gritted, dancers of breath, compasses of air that, like tangled bodies, move inside the other. Forged by the classic elements of fire, air, water and earth, they are the wombs of our imagination. They carry us and our connections, these small ancient creatures, and become both the lungs that breathe across the gallery space and the instruments that calibrate us towards a new cosmos.

Oh Kalessin, is it then really dragons that inhabit the world’s interior? Or do they walk amongst us, these ageless carriers of our unknown tales, reconnecting us to the earth while teaching us to stay with the trouble of the living and forging our world kinship with their fire?

Text by Sofie Krogh Christensen