1 MAY until 27 JUN 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-9 pm

We are delighted to present Slawomir Elsner’s first solo exhibition “Was uns nicht mehr trägt” (“What No Longer Carries Us”) at Galerie Friese, on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026.

Slawomir Elsner’s (*1976) work is characterized by a duality of techniques: abstract watercolours and figurative drawings composed of intricate networks of coloured pencil lines. The latter transform images familiar from art history and collective memory into pictures imbued with Slawomir Elsner’s artistic sensibility — rendered newly present through his distinctive vision.

The point of departure for the exhibition “Was uns nicht mehr trägt” is the figure of the horse — as a vehicle of historical and symbolic meaning. Rendered in Elsner’s characteristic coloured pencil technique, in which he approaches each image stroke by stroke, working from light into dark, the works include Manet’s “Horsewoman, Full-Face (L’Amazone)”, Raphael’s Saint George, and Franz Marc’s “Blue Horse”.

The exhibition’s second focus, the near-abstract “Nachtstücke” — a group of watercolours depicting star constellations — also carries traces of horses and riders as an echo of a vanished order. Elsner’s works move between memory and transformation, between citation and dissolution, creating a peculiar, floating, absolutely contemporary visual world.

Slawomir Elsner was born in Poland in 1976 and studied fine art at the Kunsthochschule Kassel from 1995 to 2002; in 2001, he was a master student of Norbert Radermacher there. Today, the artist lives and works in Berlin.