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

At Charlottenstrasse 24

With Like a rubber rung on a ladder, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a solo exhibition by Walid Raad in its street-facing Corner Space and adjacent window space. The two installations, which largely consist of fragmentary and composited wall-based elements, activate and visually connect interior and exterior. As in much of Raad’s practice, the works engage with history and memory, and the ways that these are shaped, recorded, presented, and interpreted. Through their limits, absences, and hiding places, the impact of conflict and violence on individual and collective experience comes to the fore – often moving beyond what is tangible or materially transportable.

Raad’s work is concerned with the dynamics of power and representation – which it stages and performs in different ways. In layered narratives that blend reality with fiction to reveal the complexity of its construction and distortions, it is not only our understanding and chronology of histories that are destabilized, but that of Raad’s work itself. The addition of “again and again” and other insertions in the work and exhibition titles here foreground repetition and reinterpretation – opening space for new meanings and contexts. A connection is drawn to long-term projects like The Atlas Group (1989 – 2004), which includes similarly titled works, and reflects the artist’s practice of revisiting his own works more broadly – often by altering or introducing new forms and narratives.

Better be watching the clouds again and again relates to other works with origins and narratives both shared and changing. Here, the work sprawls over two adjacent walls in the front window space. Though it may appear cheerful at first glance, its title hints at something ominous, an attempt to catch the unpredictable, a potential warning. The scattered flowers of different species and all varieties of color, with their own symbolic and geographic affiliations and displacements, form a landscape in bloom that slowly gives way to deeper ambiguity. The flowers frame the faces of dozens of black-and-white figures dressed in formal or military attire — highlighting and obscuring the presence of global political and military leaders of the last century. One narrative that has been associated with iterations of this work concerns Fadwa Hassoun, a fictional officer in the Lebanese Army trained as a botanist, who, during the Lebanese Civil War – an ongoing point of departure in Raad’s practice – assigned flowers as code names to politicians.

These identities, both doubled and concealed, are devoid of further context or indication. The colorless photographs, ostensibly belonging to the past yet enduring, contrast with the vibrancy and fragility of the flowers – fully alive, fully present. The photomontaged figures hover before the wall, casting varied shadows that create a gap, opening a space. Further shadows are inserted into the image, between head and flower, flower and body, adding an imaginary dimension that contributes to a heightened realism, while emphasizing a constructed nature. In juxtaposition with the flowers that disguise and subsume them, the politicians’ bodies become a kind of shadow themselves.

The installation in the Corner Space is similarly colorful and enlivened, as bursts of handwriting, like celebratory fireworks, at turns playful and threatening, are graffitied onto the walls. Through these apparently ephemeral, marginal gestures, Festival of (In)Gratitude: Love Notes brings the gallery’s interior to meet the external facades of the street outside. The writings in various scripts and languages, including English, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and French, disrupt and overlay one another. Referencing soldiers’ graffiti on bombs, the chaotic, layered inscriptions stage aggressive demonstrations of nationalist, imperialist, and violent sentiment that may slyly appear otherwise at times: signed with hearts and “xoxo”, with mention of gifts. In the embattled landscape contained within the frame of the gallery’s windows, bombs are simulated (“Boom, Boom”) – shouting loudly through an echoing silence. A central element within the installation is an overturned vintage Volkswagen Beetle – flipped on its back like a helpless insect, as though by excessive, explosive force. Cars and their engines have appeared elsewhere in Raad’s work in the context of war, engaging, for example, with the history of the car bomb during the Lebanese Wars. Here, the VW Beetle may also point to other references: its production as a military vehicle in Nazi Germany; its pop-cultural status as the “Love Bug”; the moniker “flying Volkswagens” given to the heavy artillery shells fired by the U.S. on Beirut in the 1980s.

Again and again in Raad’s work, a singular moment or reference is resisted – time, identity, and meaning flicker and slip. The instability suggested by the exhibition’s title carries through repetitions and subversions. In transformations and mutations through overlaps, gaps, and palimpsest, a linear progression wobbles and loses ground. As openings are pulled wider and the frame shifts, space is made for another experience – at once familiar and distant, approaching, yet still out of reach.

With special thanks to Sfeir-Semler Gallery for their kind cooperation.

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

At Charlottenstrasse 24

With Double Play, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a solo exhibition by Jonathan Lasker, primarily featuring his large, bold paintings from the mid to late ‘80s, alongside a selection of recent works distilled to small formats on white backgrounds. Rooted in a period in which Lasker’s decades-spanning idiosyncratic, analytical approach to painting began to coalesce, here, continuities and unexpected turns are at play both within individual paintings and across their varied surfaces.

Doubles and repetitions are a prominent presence throughout Lasker’s practice. They may be found in line – as in the double lines in the newer works, which seem to emit a buzzing energy – or between a form and its shadow, silhouette or negative space. They may also appear as inversions, outlines, or amplifications. At times, repetitive doublings turn into patterns that wobble and shift. In Double Play, a certain playfulness is emphasized, as well as play as something staged or strategic: in his works, the spontaneous may become structural, and the structural veers into spontaneity. The tendency to combine and compound produces images in persistent motion and interplay – a being in two places at once.

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

At Potsdamer Strasse 81b

José Montealegre’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Drastic Measures, presents sculptures and works on paper, which, through varied materials and their corresponding processes, carry remnants and insinuations of force. The works reflect on historical instruments of power and authority, intervening in and destabilizing these persisting structures through the simulation and reproduction of their means.

The repetition and transfer of images, forms and materials throughout engages the seductive power of art, while drawing connection to the strategies and narratives of war and conquest. In references to weaponry, armor, displays of strength or their surrounding structures, art’s role in constructing spaces is called into question – as potentially both offering protection, a refuge, and acting in complicity, giving shape to unfolding systems of power. A field of tension opens up – heightened to a breaking point, continuously on the brink of disintegration and forming anew.