1 MAY until 30 MAY 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-9 pm

At At Bleibtreustraße 45

For Between the Lines, Darren Almond’s large-scale painting Monolith acts as an underlying manifesto for the rest of the exhibition. A clearly defined zero emerges from the arboreal background, a form with multiple readings as a conceptual symbol: from the signalling of infinity, to the vanishing point of perspective, to Buddhist philosophies of ‘nothingness’. The zero as a figure acts as both a beginning and an endpoint, where life and presentness sit within bracketing eternities – a brief, luminous interval between birth and death. Its form is intertwined with that of the suspended, naked branches of a willow tree in winter, as if seen while sheltering under its canopy, looking outwards to an undisclosed horizon. The use of highly diluted pigment across the canvas echoes the way water caresses a willow’s branches during a rainstorm: the act of painting mirrors the physical behaviour of rainwater cascading under Earth’s gravitational pull, completing the water cycle and circle of life.

The willow, a tree intrinsically linked to water, becomes a symbol of cyclical processes throughout the exhibition. Across Almond’s paintings, the willow motif reappears as a place where real time and memory collide. ‘I had this moment as a young boy,’ he recalls, ‘of being completely overwhelmed by the intensity of sunlight, of its reflection across the surface of the water, the silhouetted backlit branches of a willow hanging over the pond, the intense contrast of it all. It’s an incredibly sharp, crystalline memory, and it’s one I’ve carried for almost fifty years. When you hold onto memories for such an amount of time, they start to solidify, they inform and become you, become something more than themselves. That’s why I felt it necessary to investigate this “something” I’ve cherished for all these years – memories veiled by the prismatic light of experience.’  

1 MAY until 30 MAY 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-9 pm

At Potsdamer Straße 77-87

‘The most fascinating surface on earth is that of the human face.’ Art has never ceased to be captivated by this observation, which Georg Christoph Lichtenberg recorded in his notebooks with the elegance of an aphorism. For this surface is never neutral. It is a screen for projection, a setting, a stage – a field of tension where art and society come into the closest contact. This is precisely where the exhibition The Self Assessed comes in – curated by Cornelius Tittel, who has assembled an impressive list of artists that reflects his ten years as editor-in-chief of Blau International.

The history of the self-portrait can be read as a history of such frameworks: it assigns the individual a place, as a bearer of meaning, as a role made visible, as a figure within an order that is either affirmed or called into question within the image. Only when this convention begins to crumble does the yardstick shift. It is no longer the resemblance that matters, but the intensity of the appearance, the painterly gesture, the degree of presence. In the self-portrait, this movement condenses into a paradoxical core. Here, gaze and counter-gaze coincide and yet remain irreconcilable. Anyone who depicts themselves attempts to grasp an ‘I’ that eludes all grasp. The self-portrait is not a mirror in the naive sense, but an experiment: analysis and staging at the same time. In it, the self tips over into the foreign; the face becomes form, becomes figure, becomes a silent surface. This shift runs through the exhibition as a subtle, unyielding line.

(Excerpt from a text by Nils Emmerichs, 2026)

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

At Goethestraße 2-3

Interweaving personal and collective experience, Zhang engages with migration, technology and the natural world in her distinctive visual practice. Drawing on diverse source material, from world map projections and mathematical forms to the classification of plants and butterflies, she challenges established modes of perception and interpretation within contemporary narratives and visual culture. Informed by her upbringing in China, Kenya and Thailand, as well as her shifting relationship to London where she lives and works, Zhang explores themes of identity, linguistics and the complexities of visual translation in her work, within the context of an increasingly globalised and digital world.

The exhibition title alludes to the term used to describe fluctuating circumstances that occur in real-world environments, as opposed to controlled or simulated ones. Drawing parallels with many of the central facets of Zhang’s practice, Field Conditions thus probes the boundaries between reality and illusion, original and fake, analogue and digital, flatness and depth. In her body of flower-inspired paintings, Zhang presents large-scale, vibrant canvases which shift between representation and abstraction. Foregrounding the limitations of classification, the artist references plant species with affixes such as pseudo or affinis – implying a fake or affiliated version of an original. Raising questions about authenticity and flawed attributions of values, Zhang considers the ways in which identities are forged.