1 MAY until 6 JUN 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-9 pm

Contemporary Fine Arts presents Had a Farm, a solo exhibition by Travis MacDonald opening on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026. The show occupies the upper floor of the gallery and brings together new paintings that extend his ongoing inquiry into countercultural aesthetics. For the artist, this process filters research through lived experience. What begins as study turns into narration.

Across these works, long-haired androgynous figures inhabit a setting suspended between rural life and subcultural staging. Rooted in hippie movements, these protagonists also function as analogues of the artist himself. MacDonald returns to this type of figure to explore how self-portraiture can take on different roles. Hair operates on several levels here. It carries associations of style and refusal, but it is equally bound to the material demands of his method. Wet oil descends under gravity, lending contour to each body and to the atmosphere around it. The result is an elongation that echoes the romantic spirit of Art Nouveau, with its affinity for elegance and ghostly sensuality.

The title Had a Farm introduces the exhibition with wit, giving the artist’s name an almost folkloric ring. Yet MacDonald is clear that “the farm is not to be taken literally.” Instead, it becomes a frame for cultivation, whether of a practice, an ideology, or even hair itself. The paintings unfold in an imagined settlement, based on photographic archives of experimental communes from the 1970s, many established in disused farms or small towns. From that source, he builds scenes shaped by proximity and friction, and by the wish to (co)exist otherwise.

Before the brush meets the canvas, MacDonald writes a script and assembles a storyboard. The premise is simple: amid a housing crisis, young, educated people relocate to a provincial area, where they encounter conservative residents whose families have been there for generations. The clash is both cultural and political. MacDonald approaches it obliquely. He does not reduce it to a slogan. Rather, he selects intimate episodes and small but revealing gestures, rendering them as compositions whose natural, earthy palette keeps the drama grounded.

These paintings draw on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1973 essay Il discorso dei capelli, published in English as The Hippies’ Speech. MacDonald responds to Pasolini’s understanding of appearance as a political sign and to the responsibility of paying attention to one’s surroundings. The reference feels timely. Without making the works direct statements, he suggests a quiet parallel between past expressions of nonconformity and the current rise of authoritarian thinking. Care, in this context, is not softness. It is an ethic of alertness.

What emerges in Had a Farm is a world with its own logic. MacDonald has developed this language over time, using it as a vehicle for storytelling and observation. Here, it grows sharper and more decisive. The show invites viewers into a charged social space where identification remains open and belonging stays provisional. It is a place of attraction and unease. The pull of a group is palpable, as is the strain that shadows any departure from the norm. These paintings do not offer escape. They ask how closeness can hold under pressure, and whether something larger than the self might still be forged.

Text by Nicolas Vamvouklis

1 MAY until 6 JUN 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-9 pm

Contemporary Fine Arts presents Nouveaux Tableaux, the first solo exhibition of French artist Julien Heintz at the gallery, opening on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026. Installed on the ground floor, the show brings together new oil paintings that look to the last century not for spectacle, but for the pressure that remains within its records.

Heintz uses photographs and documentary stills tied to episodes that marked Western culture, especially war and its aftermath. Yet he does not paint acts of cruelty directly. He turns instead to charged pauses and faces caught between events, attentive to the quiet weight that follows violence. What matters is not reconstruction for its own sake, but the possibility of handling trauma with care and restraint.

Several works take Walter Jackson Freeman II as a point of departure, the American neurologist who performed lobotomies for four decades. Heintz started from archival photographs of women labelled hysterical and deemed unfit for society. In those documents, their faces appear before and after the procedure. Many were not suffering from severe mental illness. In the artist’s treatment, clinical description gives way to an uneasy mode of witness. These are portraits shaped by what institutions project onto a body, and by what survives that imposition. Elsewhere, Russian soldiers in ushanka hats derive from prison imagery linked to Operation Barbarossa. Again, Heintz avoids illustration. He stays with the human presence inside the historical frame.

The visual sources often come from film footage, and that sense of suspended time endures within the work. Forms do not settle into certainty. Features seem to emerge and withdraw at once, as if the surface were holding a memory in motion. For Heintz, this is crucial. “I’m trying to capture that moment while respecting the atmosphere,” he says. Even when a figure is cropped, he insists on knowing the wider setting from which that person has been taken. Context may not be fully visible, but it governs the framing, giving each canvas its inner tension. The result is not fixed narrative, but a field of suggestion where intimacy and geopolitics are tightly bound.

That tension is also material. Before painting, Heintz prepares every support with a gesso of marble powder, rabbit-skin glue, and water. It is dense and mineral. It recalls fresco and the Quattrocento artists he has studied closely. Across it, oil builds in successive layers. The making of each work is slow and exacting. Heintz values craftsmanship and wants every piece to exist as a finely wrought object. Repetition is part of that discipline, but never as routine. Each attempt shifts. Each outcome carries a distinct tone. He likens the process to music composition, with different voices brought into relation until the whole begins to resonate. The labour is patient, almost meditative.

A spectral quality runs through Nouveaux Tableaux, though not in any gothic or uncanny way. It belongs to remembrance. Heintz approaches the past in order to ask what lingers, and how neglected stories bear on the world today. The exhibition invites immersion in that unstable territory where individual destinies meet larger forces. Nothing here is reduced to innocence or guilt alone. Each subject holds its own burden. Together, they open onto a broader register, letting viewers move between singular lives and a shared condition.

Text by Nicolas Vamvouklis