3 MAY until 9 AUG 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

At Christinenstrasse 18 – 19, 10119 Berlin

Olafur Eliasson’s ninth solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, The lure of looking through a polarised window of opportunities, or seeing a surprise before it’s reduced, split, and then further reduced, marks 30 years of collaboration with the gallery. The presentation builds on Eliasson’s ongoing exploration of the relativity of perception and features a new body of works that engages with the physical properties of light. 

Over the last three decades, Eliasson has examined our modes of seeing and encountering the world. The current exhibition extends this investigation with installations and complex geometric sculptures, using simple means to reveal the complexity of light and the contingency of what we see. 

The artworks on display share a common set of materials and principles. They all explore polarization – optical filters that allow light waves of a specific orientation, or polarity, to pass through them while blocking all other waves. Polarization filters are commonly found in photography, where they are used to reduce lens flares. Eliasson reimagines this conventional function with his latest series of works, using these filters instead to create unexpected optical effects. A new installation resembles an experimental setup constructed from simple materials: spotlights, sheets of plastic and polarizing filters. Two spotlights shine through a polarized window into the gallery rooms. The light falls onto two rotating, equally polarized sculptural forms, producing vibrant colors that dissolve and reemerge. This phenomenon results from a quality of the material known as birefringence, in which the transparent surface splits light waves into rays that move at slightly different angles and speeds. The combination of the birefringent material and the two polarizing filters conjures multiple colors through an analytic process, whereby the white light is reduced, split, and then further reduced. As in much of the artist’s practice, the act of viewing takes on a dynamic, embodied dimension. While some elements of the artwork are in motion, it is primarily the viewers’ own movements and the changing angles of their bodies that activate the artwork. By moving around and assuming a different angle of view, they alter what they see. The works come to life through their engagement. Eliasson’s concept of polarization suggests a shift from rigid oppositions to a more fluid and inclusive perspective. By revealing the inner workings of perception, the exhibition challenges and reorganizes preconceived notions, turning these mechanisms into ways to reconsider our environment.

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) is currently the subject of a series of institutional solo exhibitions staged throughout Southeast Asia. Inaugurated at Singapore Art Museum in 2024, before traveling to Auckland Art Gallery and later that year, it will continue to Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2025); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Jakarta (2025 – 2026); and Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2026). The artist has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2024); National Museum of Qatar, Doha (2023); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2022); Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2022); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2021)
; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo (2020); Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich (2020); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao (2020); Tate Modern, London (2019); Serralves, Porto (2019); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2018); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2018); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2016); Château de Versailles, Versailles (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2010); Museum of Modern Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2008); Tate Modern, London, (2003); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2001); and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (1997). Eliasson lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.

For further press information and imagery, please contact Jonathan Friedrich Stockhorst: +49 30 288 77277 or jonathan@neugerriemschneider.com

3 MAY until 16 AUG 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm

At Linienstrasse 155, 10115 Berlin

The group exhibition advective motion, nebulous currents takes obfuscation as its focus, with narratives dissolved behind fog, distorted, streaked, rippled and pixelated in transformative actions, or softened to blurs. Here, in sculptures, photographs, prints and textiles, the rigidity of an articulated image dissipates and reality becomes malleable – undefinable and fleeting. As compositions meld in on themselves, perception reconfigures to scenes dreamlike and surreal, with afterimages, reverberations and ambient fluidity reflecting the ambiguities of modern existence.

ai weiwei                             Nord Stream, 2022

Ai Weiwei’s Nord Stream (2022) uses a photograph of the whirlpool resulting from a ruptured Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline, taken by the Danish Ministry of Defense, as the base for its large-scale iteration in pixel-like Lego bricks, creating a link between the source and its wide-spread presence across digital media. Captured southeast of the Danish island of Bornholm on September 27, 2022, a day after the leak began, the aerial view encapsulates over two decades of heated international relations, and brings to mind the artist’s own career-long political involvement and activism. In using a seemingly playful, readily accessible medium, Ai leverages the colorful bricks’ approachability to draw attention to a critical moment, while employing their playful associations to give rise to tension between the material’s expected levity and the crucial, yet fragmented, scene on view.

thomas bayrle                     And Back Again – Helke II, 1991

Emerging in the 1960s from the visual languages of contemporary graphic design, advertising and mechanized weaving, Thomas Bayrle’s practice leveraged the mass-produced object and networks of infrastructure as tools for portraiture. Instrumental to this process was what he dubbed the Superform: A method of assembling series of repeated motifs to a larger image. In And Back Again – Helke II (1991), Bayrle presents a portrait of his wife, the Superform’s component parts here separated and flattened. No longer readily readable as a human likeness, the work takes on an abstraction rare for the artist, its optically rich patterning sending the gaze into a frenzy of misdirection. 

andreas eriksson                 Lidköping No. 10, 2024

Employing a diverse archive of linens and silks, Andreas Eriksson’s Lidköping No. 10 (2024) builds upon the artist’s signature fields of color, translated to a hand-woven tapestry, augmented by organic, fringe-like inclusions. Threads emerge from the composition’s ground, draping over and sporadically masking its textured surface to cascade downward. They appear as if unraveled from their sources, yet upon closer inspection, are revealed to be intentional inclusions methodically ordered along an unseen grid, evolved from and expanding the principles of his painted works.

mario garcía torres              When Stillness Produces Beautiful Moments, n.d.

Mario García Torres’ sculptural work When Stillness Produces Beautiful Moments (n.d.) is a poignant tribute to Alighiero Boetti – the Italian conceptualist to whom the artist has dedicated a number of crucial projects throughout his career. Here, García Torres takes as his point of departure Boetti’s Autoritratto (Mi Fuma Il Cervello) (1993 – 1994) – a self-portrait in which a bronze garden hose arcs water onto its head, where the stream meets heating elements and quickly turns to steam. García Torres’ work reduces Boetti’s selfportrait to just its hose, forming a monument to absence left in the wake of his outsized impact, and a testament to transformation and the vaporous nature of thought.

isa genzken                        Wolfgang, 1998

Isa Genzken’s Wolfgang (1998) is part of a series of sculptural works by the artist in which she assembles metallic and wooden panels to columns that tower above a viewer in approximations of contemporary architecture and its sleek glass exteriors. In Wolfgang, sterile mesh plates and warm-toned boards of fine-grained wood alternate as they ascend the monolith, revealing and concealing the structure’s barren interior in measured intervals. The layers of perforated material give rise to a moiré pattern that complicates the work’s strict structure, countering the principles of Modernism with contrasting, individualized modes of perception. 

shilpa gupta                         Untitled, 2016

Plumes of dense smoke waft through the 12 panels of Shilpa Gupta’s photographic work Untitled (2016), where curled apparitions take on shapes indefinite and infinite, dodging focus as they emerge from the edges of each composition. As much of Gupta’s work, Untitled too addresses the paradox of definitions, in particular the arbitrary nature of borders and the methods with which they are often drawn and enforced. Evocative of clouds, the pictured smoke is granted free passage into the domestic, its very presence the deconstruction of traditional divides.

louise lawler                       What Is Painting (swiped), 2022/2023

Louise Lawler’s What Is Painting (swiped) (2022/2023) – part of a series of photographs distorted by her moving camera and its open shutter – sees the bright canvas and dark lettering of John Baldessari’s What Is Painting? (1966 – 1968) blur as if in dynamic motion. Spatially shifted, or “swiped,” Lawler’s action enters into conversation with Baldessari’s. She counters the painting’s semi-ironic message through layers of appropriation and reinterpretation, and in turn, interrogates the conditions of authorship, institutional display and canonization.

sharon lockhart                   Untitled, 2023

A mid-winter landscape as it rises gently before the camera, obscuring the approach to the sea that sits behind it, features in Sharon Lockhart’s Untitled (2023). Tall grasses, rendered pale by the season’s set-in chill, are coated in airy layers of falling snow. Fog looms, creating a nearly empty sky – the image’s intricately textured lower segment starkly contrasts the void that lies above it, masking the world that presumably lies beyond. Here, Lockhart re-engages with the seascapes and shorelines that have pervaded her practice for the past decades in a musing on a relentless, life-sustaining, yet unknowable force.

tobias rehberger                 Utagawa Kunisada Shiko no nagame 1829 I, 2015

The vibrantly colored mural in Tobias Rehberger’s Utagawa Kunisada Shiko no nagame 1829 I (2015) sees a pixelated image, coded and imperceptible until viewed from a distance or reduced to fit a screen. Only then do the oversized, square-shaped modules merge to an facsimile of an erotic Japanese shunga woodcut. This print sits behind a vase that, clad in this same motif, seemingly disappears against its background, camouflaging itself while remaining in plain sight, thus allowing Rehberger to interrogate how context informs object’s impact and allows it to transform. 

tomás saraceno                  Wayra 246, 2025

Tomás Saraceno’s Wayra 246 (2025), a sculptural network of solid-glass polyhedrons composed to cloud-like clusters of interconnected modules, appear to exist at the intersection of air, water and earth. The work’s suspended structures intertwine and seem to physically support one another through their shared facets, prompting questions on notions of space, order and symbiosis. Here, Saraceno juxtaposes the static nature of sculptural forms and the organic movement of natural systems, while the faces’ enigmatic transparency hints at the fluidity of boundaries and the interdependence of systems and their surroundings.

simon starling                      Pin Board Painting, 2021

In the meticulously constructed, two-part installation Pin Board Painting (2021), Simon Starling takes as a point of departure an early 20th-century installation view from what was then the Berliner Nationalgalerie in Berlin (today the Alte Nationalgalerie), recreating this once-miniscule catalog reproduction in magnified form using black push-pins. The countless pins are precisely clustered such that their round heads emulate an offset print’s method of rendering an image. Re-photographed and shrunk back to the image’s initial dimensions as discovered in its source, the inserted push-pins begin to visually coalesce, forming what appears as the original installation photograph, and in turn crafting a commentary on the subjectivity of the image. 

With her tapestry Noisy Calm, November (2025), Pae White returns to the elaborate process of translating the ephemeral to woven materials, paying tribute to the natural world’s splendor. To reinterpret the tradition-rich, labor-intensive, enduring technique of weaving, she fabricates a digital image using an industrial Jacquard loom in a clash of media and theme. Here, threads of cotton and polyester capture the elusive by way of a lakefront landscape. Softened behind low-lying mist, the articulated image begins to dissolve, suspended between representation and abstraction, inscrutable and barely tangible. 

12 JUL until 23 AUG 2025
Opening – 11 JUL 2025, 6-9 pm

At Linienstrasse 155, 10115 Berlin  

In Mario García Torres’ fifth solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, Nada me han enseñado los años (“All These Years Have Taught Me Nothing”), time, remembrance and theatrical tactics enmesh in a consideration of narrative construction, and an inquiry into the often obscured notion of truth, both in imagery and in reality. Often concerned with the global legacy of conceptual art, closely inspecting the art-historical record, García Torres here turns his conceptually laden investigative approach toward his native Mexico, presenting an essayistic ensemble of motifs, long-present in his memory, to trace a speculative chronicle of the country’s past century. The new black-and-white oil paintings – the artist’s first forays into figuration – are assembled to a storyboard that posits itself as archival testimony, yet possesses a sheen that threatens to betray it. Tension between the canvases rises as intent, action and retelling entangle, selectively echoing one another to fuel dialogs on the conditions of painting and the ever-developing role of the symbolic. 

The past, for García Torres, is a seemingly infinite store of potentialities, its events mere suggestions guiding a slate of independent readings. That which is touted as conclusive becomes, in his practice, a beginning – a point of origin for histories to be examined, expanded, redeveloped, unlearned and learned anew. Moments in time are made to spaces for fabrication and fact to share with ease. These ostensible opposites, placed on equal footing, enter exchange across a porous divide, dissolving into one another as paradoxes are brought to fruition. The imagined and the actual merge to experimental, lyrical wanderings through mutable time in – perception and recall, replete with their inconsistencies and circuitous reliances, are put to the test, forged as tools for dissecting the concepts of mythmaking.

Post-revolutionary Mexico stands at the foundation of Nada me han enseñado los años, setting the scene for the narrative that García Torres unfolds within it. This period’s search for a new national identity, bolstered by those who had come to power after a decade of conflict, saw intellectuals – painters, photographers, playwrights and philosophers – work to define their country’s past and to envision its future. A selection of these figures, many of whom were avant-gardists and critics with fraught relationships to Mexican society, feature in and lay the groundwork for García Torres’ series of images. Iterations of archival documents and their fictionalizations entwine to describe a constructed history, becoming integral parts of the artist’s career-long search for and engagement with artistic lineages. 

Central to this task are four works (all n.d.), algorithmically drafted before being heavily altered and painted, created around Salvador Novo (1904 – 1974) and Julio Antonio Mella (1903 – 1929). Salvador Novo, whose cutting, rebellious, intentionally provocative prose, poems and plays cemented him as one of the early 20th century’s leading Spanish-language thinkers, is seen in a surreal fivefold portrait – itself a take-off on Marcel Duchamp’s own 1917 multiple portrait – its details blurred in painterly, dreamlike flourishes. Positioned around a table, the quintet embodies the many-pronged nature of retrospection so often at the center of García Torres’ investigations. Dramatically lit, and set against broad, curtain-like strokes of black, the image becomes a stage production’s monologue, fanned out to expose its protagonist’s inner negotiations. Julio Antonio Mella, a founding member of the Cuban

Communist Party, fled to Central America in 1926 after years of political activism had led to his persecution and arrest. He made his way to and settled in Mexico City where, less than three years later, he was assassinated at the age of 25 under mysterious circumstances. His partner, Italian photographer and fellow activist Tina Modotti, bore witness that night and came under suspicion. In pursuit of her exoneration, Diego Rivera, noted muralist and personal friend of Mexico’s then-president, organized a recreation of the murder for the authorities, directed by and starring former actress Modotti. In García Torres’ trio of works, the staged event, its setting pictured in varying stages of activation, theatrical reality unravels, leaving precedent for subjective, nonlinear, unresolved histories in its wake. 

Arranged filmically, this project’s suite of works follows a cinematic arc as argumentative, plot-advancing images alternate with those drawn from sources spanning from geological phenomena to quotidian sights and internet culture. García Torres here tells a story of spectacle, reenactment, disappearance and appropriation, fluctuating into the present day, navigating the fallibilities and contingencies of mining the past and, in a self-reflexive operation, cycling back to the complexities of the present.

Mario García Torres (b. 1975) is currently the subject of his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, A History of Influence at Fridericianum in Kassel until July 27. He has previously been the subject of solo exhibitions at international institutions including MARCO, Monterrey (2021); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2020); WIELS, Brussels (2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2018 – 2019); TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2016); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2016); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth (2015); Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2008); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007). He participated in Desert X, Desert Hot Springs (2023); Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah (2017); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); the 29th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2010); the 7th Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2010); Yokohama Triennale 2008, Yokohama (2008); and the 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice (2007). He lives and works in Mexico City.