11 SEP – 24 OCT 2026

Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6–10 pm

We are pleased to present Return to Content a/b, Julia Wachtel’s (b. 1956, lives and works in New York and Connecticut) first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany. A collaborative project between Jahn & Jahn and Klemm’s, Return to Content a/b offers an expansive overview of Wachtel’s practice across Munich and Berlin.

Julia Wachtel’s oil, acrylic, and silkscreen-on-canvas paintings draw on popular culture to explore the impact of our image-saturated world. She is a prominent figure among the Pictures Generation artists who emerged in early-1980s New York, brought together by a shared interest in the proliferation of images across popular culture, mass media, and advertising.

Wachtel has continuously refined her formal vocabulary while maintaining a strong conceptual foundation, never relinquishing her enduring interest in hyperreality. Wachtel’s image compositions operate as a loop of desire and self-confirmation. She appropriates, juxtaposes, and ultimately distills images into concentrated paintings, shifting their original logic and inviting an examination of the emotional, political, and aesthetic conditions of an image-driven world. All in all, they stage a flattened emotional register in which nostalgia, aspiration, and anxiety coexist in a disquieting equilibrium.

While Wachtel’s early work mined posters of movie stars, pin-up girls, political figures, pop music icons, or cartoon characters, her recent work explores the vast terrain of the internet, a space of constantly replenished images on a disorienting scale, further amplified by the rise of AI-generated imagery.

Over the years, Wachtel’s work has been exhibited extensively internationally and integrated into the renowned collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva; and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.

Return to Content a/b opens at Klemm’s in Berlin on September 10 and at Jahn & Jahn in Munich on September 17. Both exhibitions will be accompanied by a text by Jens Asthoff.

11 SEP – 24 OCT 2026

Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6–10 pm

tracks, taps explores the entanglement of desire and exhaustion in an image-saturated world. Foregrounding the plasticity of images, the exhibition brings together Mia Gap (1993, Germany) and Freja Sofie Kirk (1990, Denmark), pairing two image-making strategies grounded in dissection, exposure, and concealment. The exhibition is curated by Guilherme Vilhena Martins.

Mia Gap approaches the digital everyday as a dynamic synthesis of relations uncoupled from geographic distance and linear time. Drawing on painterly, photographic, and sculptural strategies, Gap transforms digitally conceived scenarios into physical objects, probing the unstable boundaries between authenticity, reality, and simulation. Her compositions emerge through the accumulation of temporal and spatial layers, in which everyday tropes are collected, sampled, and reworked into dense material assemblages. This process mirrors the mechanisms of image production to which Gap’s work directly responds: accumulation, endless sampling, and the temporal compression of the digital present.

Through her ongoing engagement with photography and video, Freja Sofie Kirk examines the inner mechanisms of images and the reciprocal relationship between media and everyday life. Kirk’s works are characterized by a hypnotic affective force, drawing viewers into narratives of power, architecture, commodities, fetishism, and the choreography of labor. Above all, she stresses how media is absorbed into social relations and routines, and how these, in turn, become absorbed into media. Kirk directly addresses these dynamics, foregrounding the entanglement of desire and mortality embedded within entertainment industry imagery. 

Taken together, their practices reveal the image as a mutable material, capable of moving between physical, digital, and affective registers. They trace opposing yet complementary movements: while Gap’s panels materialize digitally conceived worlds as physical objects, Kirk mobilizes the virtual to reshape perception through sensorial and cinematic strategies, twisting images beyond the limits of the two-dimensional frame. tracks, taps unfolds through this tension, positioning the image as a site where seduction, materiality and simulation coexist rather than resolve.

tracks, taps opens at Klemm’s Downstairs on September 10, 2026 and runs through October 24, 2026. The exhibition is part of Berlin Art Week, which takes place September 9—13,2026.