neugerriemschneider is pleased to present Thaddeus Strode’s thirteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Entitled ‽ (Pyramids of California), this collection of new works showcases a vast visual lexicon drawn from the artist’s physical and cultural surroundings, mass media, art history, music, film, existential philosophies and the legacies of his conceptualist forbearers and mentors. He creates direct, responsive reflections of the present moment that encompass painting and sculpture within an installation-oriented framework, oscillating between the specific and the ambivalent, and inviting a viewer’s active participation through interpretation.

Titled for the interrobang—the ligature of an exclamation point and a question mark—Strode’s exhibition captures the energetic forthrightness of the comics that were at the origin of his artmaking and continue to serve as key stylistic and conceptual references. An unpronounceable symbol on its own, the interrobang concisely conveys awe and shock—a notion complementing Strode’s system of reflecting upon existence amidst societal uncertainty. The show’s subtitle, Pyramids of California, evokes the fantasy ascribed to the mythologized region where the artist grew up, lives and works, hinting at a grand embellishment of the non-fictional and probing the distinction between reality and fabrication. Here he addresses the natural malleability of language and his world-building capacity: Conflating, fusing and creating narratives anew frequently appears in his work, often manifesting as surreal, collage-like compositions that span media and technique.

Strode adopts a pared-down, iconographic ethos for the exhibition’s sculptural cutouts and paintings. The former, with imagery scanned from publications or the artist’s sketches, are magnified to become larger than life and push the presentation into a spatial dimension. For the latter, Strode employs his intuitive process to showcase each work’s most salient elements through deliberate, honed applications of vibrant color, spray-painted accents, dimensional texturing or expressive black outlines. Pairing this with deft navigation of negative space, he foregrounds immediacy in meditations on the here and now, using visual motifs and a wide cast of characters, often from popular culture, along with textual fragments. These pithy statements or quotes, generally appearing as freely associative non sequiturs, build upon the comic-book tradition of thought bubbles—illustrated externalizations of internal expression. Strode’s compositions share and expand upon this principle, and through a focus on portraiture, turn this introspection outwards. Their subjects are frequently personal, birthed from self-reflection, yet remain ambiguous and open-ended, inviting each viewer’s individual conclusions. The works’ nuanced archetypes that take on identities all their own. They occupy space and time of Strode’s creation, featuring in images that amalgamate intentionality and reception, and together, reckon with an ambivalent future while looking ahead toward its potential.

Thilo Heinzmann’s pigment paintings, each entitled O.T. (all 2022), are the results of diverse cumulative processes, encapsulating analytical approaches to painting and an understanding of the discipline’s component parts as developed and refined over the course of his career and across work complexes such as his Aicmo and Tacmo series – the results of painterly research and discovery. Heinzmann reaches toward the essentials, dissecting the medium to expose its fundamentals, and deploying his established tools including color, form, line, space, texture and contour in dynamic interplay. In doing so, he strikes a delicate balance between concentrated decision making and unpredictability.

Work by Thilo Heinzmann (b. 1969) has been featured in international institutional exhibitions, and is in a number of public collections including Tate, London; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; M+, Hong Kong and Tiroler Landesmuseen, Innsbruck. Thilo Heinzmann is a professor of painting at Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany, where he lives and works.