Throughout his body of work Ai has returned to Lego bricks time and again, laboriously harnessing pieces by the hundreds of thousands to interrogate the parameters of imagemaking and production, honing his use of the material and expanding its representational and theoretical capacities to shape facsimiles of well-known works of art and other popular media. Honoring Marcel Duchamp and his legacy of the readymade, Ai deploys the mass-produced objects for adaptations of preexisting motifs, translating and often modifying them within his own social and political contexts, the angular components mimicking the pixels that coalesce to become today’s digital, widely and infinitely distributed imagery.

Continuing the exhibition’s showcase of masterwork-derived compositions is Water Lilies #2 (2022), devised in reference to Claude Monet’s early 20th-century series of monumental paintings. Portraying a meditative tableau from the storied Impressionist’s meticulously crafted gardens, Ai’s Water Lilies #2 spans three walls and a length of over 15 meters. Its scale and form cast the work as all-enveloping, allowing for a viewer’s complete absorption in its intricacies. Punctuating the right-hand side of the color-shifted composition is a rectangular door—the entrance to the subterranean home in which the young artist and his father, poet Ai Qing, lived after being driven into exile in the late 1950s, transforming the work through autobiographical, intergenerational dialogue.

For Nord Stream (2022), Ai departs from reproductions of canonical works and turns his focus to a contemporary news photograph showing the result of the ruptured Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline—a nearly frame-filling whirlpool set against a blue field of waves that encapsulates over two decades of heated international relations. Here, Ai brings to mind his own career-long political involvement and activism, expanding on his past work around migration to Europe across treacherous waterways, and questioning the dichotomy between international concern for human lives and that for resources and capital. The image itself and its large-scale maelstrom possess a visual magnetism, wavering between abstraction and representation in a mode that alludes to both the Pollock and Monet tributes on view.

In das himmel, Pawel Althamer’s seventh solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, themes of love, healing and renewal manifest as a universal venue for reflection. Taking shape through a complex of sculptural forms divergent in scale, medium and approach, the presentation becomes an artist’s salon, its role tinged in the wake of its reconfiguration of access and purpose. Decidedly dense in its arrangement, das himmel possesses a material bulk that paradoxically serves as a blank canvas for artist and visitor alike – a sandbox for freely associative connections and projections. A hot tub installed in the gallery’s courtyard from March 2 – 16 acts as a counterpart to the exhibition’s interior component, expanding upon its communal spirit and serving as Althamer’s invitation to deepened internal reflection.

At the conceptual center of das himmel is a sculptural fireplace: a symbol of a home, those that inhabit it and its unique gravitational pull, by way of which physical warmth becomes interpersonal and emotional. Here, two angelic figures, their poses reminiscent of imagery of antiquity and the Renaissance, raise their arms to support a mantel of swirling forms that approximate clouds, smoke and waves. Contained between the pair is a constructed fire, its flames emanating from a dragon inspired by the figures of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 Guernica. The hearth as a locus of exchange radiates to its surroundings, extending outward to a rug-covered floor and an oversized, adapted, throne-like chair, rendering a wider public as participants in Althamer’s domestic. The sculptural continues to pervade das himmel in a vase depicting a couple in heartfelt embrace. Flowers fill the hollowed form in an intimation of life that mirrors the vitality suffusing its setting. A further ceramic portrait, split down its middle, becomes an ode not just to its subject, but to transformation and the happenstance nature of the artistic process. Seen together, the installation’s elements join to a cohesive whole, employing the gallery’s space as a frame that defines and contextualizes its staging.