Friedemann Heckel
Open Doors

Each of the three large sepia-tone watercolors are based on photographs from Heckel’s grandparents’ archive: a 1942 portrait of his grandfather’s military horse, an image of an empty table from their 1949 wedding, and a view through a large window from the interior of their recently-demolished post-war modernist bungalow originally completed in 1961. Two smaller-scale watercolors are based on Heckel’s own photographs of a fish kill in Berlin’s Landwehr Canal in the summer of 2023. Curtains dyed with iron rust hang from the gallery’s ceiling; porcelain casts of the door handle of Heckel’s grandparents’ home are installed on walls and lying on the floor throughout. Open Doors connects a melancholic past with the present, subtly weaving together broad intergenerational perspectives and latent inter-familial intricacies.