2 MAY until 21 JUN 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 7-9 pm

We are delighted to present the exhibition Double Standard by New York-based artist Anthony Goicolea as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin.

On view are new paintings on canvas and Mylar, in which Goicolea explores a theme that runs like a red thread through his entire body of work: the contradiction between inner and outer perception, the conflict between self-determination and external expectations, the tension between societal norms and personal identity — resulting from different cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, or gender roles.

Anthony Goicolea, born in 1971 in Atlanta, Georgia, as the son of Cuban immigrants, is regarded as one of the most versatile contemporary artists of his generation. After graduating from the Pratt Institute in New York, he rose to prominence in the late 1990s with photo collages and video works in which he digitally inserted multiple versions of himself using advanced image-editing and compositing techniques. Later, he shifted his focus to painting and installation art, always with the goal of exploring the condition of the individual in strange, unfamiliar surroundings.

In 2018, Goicolea created the large LGBTQ Memorial in Hudson River Park — a highly visible, light-based monument commissioned by the City of New York to commemorate the victims of the 2016 shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, as well as all others who have suffered from anti-queer violence.

In the exhibition “Double Standard,” Goicolea takes us on an emotional journey through realms of constant searching for meaning. He portrays figures caught in bizarre, melancholic moments, seemingly trapped at the threshold between reality and the dream world.

His painting style is characterized by an expressive visual language, masterfully combined with surreal elements. A distinctive feature is the subtle humor that counterbalances the darker tones of his works. Amidst the drama and isolation, there are always moments of irony and lightness, inviting viewers to accept — and perhaps even embrace — life’s absurdities.

The profound pull toward ambiguity and the unsettling in Goicolea’s work is rooted in his own biography. On the one hand, he grew up as the child of Cuban immigrants in the American South; on the other, he realized as a teenager that he was gay. Early on, he became familiar with the feeling of being out of place, the unspoken discomfort of being in a situation without knowing exactly what feels wrong. In his art, he continuously seeks out borderlands and liminal spaces — those precarious moments where both temporal and spatial orientation become unstable and viewers can no longer be certain of what they are actually seeing.

Goicolea’s paintings reveal this displaced unease of the foreign or the uncanny — not immediately, not overtly, not aggressively, but with a charming, affectionate subtlety. The colors are intense, the gazes — even when drifting — remain fixed, the bodies androgynous, youthful, slightly lascivious, yet never intrusive.

The literally “off-kilter” nature of his motifs often remains understated, only to suddenly unfold its full dramatic force. You believe Goicolea when he says that the idea of a “before” and “after” has never really interested him. His protagonists move within a tension-filled space between prescribed imagery and our personal interpretations. With references to pop culture, mass media, and fictional memories, they seem to emerge from a pool of images and ideas that feel both familiar and alien.

Thus, his paintings tenderly but at the same time threateningly convey a life experience deeply known to many who are queer or belong to another minority: the solidifying brokenness, the brave yet fearful exploration of one’s identity when you are not like everyone else around you.

Rather than presenting a linear narrative, Goicolea’s paintings capture fleeting snapshots — brief, frozen moments of the absurd but also the liberating, as if someone had pressed the pause button in a shaky coming-of-age film.

Anthony Goicolea’s work is represented in major museum collections both in the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Yale University Art Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid.