In her second solo exhibition at the Drawing Room, Paris-born, Berlin-based artist Maya Schweizer presents her latest video Errant Gestures in a film installation. In her eight-minute film, Schweizer shows a selection of intentional and unintentional movements in sound and image that oscillate between standstill and permanent movement. Her gaze focusses on the beginning or end of a movement, expressed by our extremities, hands and feet. Mimic and gestural movement patterns have deep cultural roots that go back to the beginnings of human communication. Long before language developed, they already served as instruments of communication. Against this background, the simultaneous translation of expressive movements is already ingrained in us. We are constantly exchanging non-verbal messages - whether we want to or not. Sometimes the signals are clear, sometimes we misunderstand them. The body is never silent. When people come together, they talk to each other - even when they are not speaking. Facial expressions, gestures, posture and movement, spatial relationships, touch and clothing are important means of non-verbal communication - an age-old form of interpersonal understanding.

Maya Schweizer
Errant Gestures, 2023
Film still

Photo: Maya Schweizer, Berlin
Courtesy: Maya Schweizer, Berlin and Drawing Room, Hamburg

In his second exhibition in the Drawing Room, titled ‘instrumentals’, Christian Haake is showing new abstract works that oscillate between panel painting and drawing, sculpture, and relief. Traces of paint application and abrasion have been deposited on their matt white surfaces. Fragments of architecture stand out from this carefully layered, seemingly yellowed projection surface, as do symbols or typographical elements, which seem to be borrowed from the visual language of comics or old advertising slogans. One thinks one recognizes walls, windows, ventilation grilles, floor plans or speech bubbles, punctuation marks and fragments of advertising signs. With his 'architectural diaries', the artist processes subjectively experienced spaces and urban landscapes by recreating them from memory and condensing them into notations or "formulas" that we as viewers can charge with our own spatial memory and imagination. In doing so, he analogizes the reduced formal language of his most recent works to 'instrumentals' - pieces of music without words, which, like his pictorial process, manage without a clear narrative, and whose lack of unambiguity or figuration makes them particularly capable of stimulating the memory and imagination of the recipient. In Christian Haake's 'reality games', cognitive and sensual perception itself becomes the subject of the picture.

fisherman's enemy, 2023
wood, binder, acrylic
49,8 x 41 x 2,8 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Helge Mundt, Hamburg

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In her exhibition LETTERS at the Drawing Room, Helene Appel presents new small- and large-format paintings that place their viewers in everyday and often casual situations that have to do with writing and reading, peeling and washing up. Helene Appel paints banal everyday objects in a spectacular way. She always portrays her subjects in their original size, isolated on an untreated canvas, regardless of whether it is an envelope, car lights or potato peelings. Despite the true-to-life representation of the pictorial objects, reminiscent of classical still lifes, Appel's paintings are characterised by a high degree of abstraction. Through the process of painting, the artist activates the objects she portrays and charges them with an aura of autonomy or agency. In this way, the artist approaches a profound and multifaceted theme in her painting: What is it about "the things" that surround us every day with apparent matter-of-factness? What power do they have over us? Because things represent: they have the power to visualise memories, symbolise social relationships and choreograph our ritual existence.
Helene Appel (*1976, Karlsruhe) studied at the HFBK in Hamburg and at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2011 she received the Goslar Kaiserring Scholarship, and in 2019 the two-year Dorothea Erxleben Scholarship at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. She lives and works in Berlin.

Potato peelings, 2023
Acrylic on linen
163.5 x 134 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Helene Appel, Berlin

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Three series, three worlds and three photographic approaches: Archaic hybrid creatures, one’s own family, and insights into a work and life relationship. With the current presentation, the Drawing Room gallery is looking once again at contemporary photographic positions from France. On display are the winners of the Prix Polyptyque, the fifth edition of which went to Julia Gat, Andrea Graziosi, and the artist duo Lara Tabet and Randa Mirza, working under the name “Jeanne et Moreau”. The result is an exhibition that revolves around questions of belonging, tradition, identity, and intimacy.

Julia Gat
Sara dans la nouvelle maison à Marseille,2021
Pigment print on dibond
60 x 40 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Julia Gat, Marseille / Rotterdam

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In her second solo exhibition at the Drawing Room, Berlin-based artist Anke Völk makes the movement of the brush the motif in her new paintings. In large sweeps, her broad brush or squeegee moves across the black canvas and transfers the movements of her body into painting. The exhibition title colour it! refers to colour as the basic element of painting. In Völk's luministic-atmospheric paintings, her green, blue and violet hues gain their phenomenal luminosity from the darkness of the black pictorial background from which they emerge. The result of her analysis of the dynamic potential of colours are shiny metallic surfaces with the lucid quality of water and the matt shimmer of polished metal.

Anke Völk has recently received the prestigious Villa Aurora Fellowship and will be working in Los Angeles in autumn 2023.

Untitled, 2022
Flashe, acrylic and pigment on canvas
55 x 44 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Anke Völk, Berlin

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The artist Noi Fuhrer, who was born in Tel Aviv and lives in Berlin, is showing her first exhibition POLAR at the Drawing Room – a group of mainly large-format charcoal drawings of haunting presence. They capture everyday scenes and strange fragments of moments that feed on different (dream) worlds or seem like the reverberations of a memory. The narrative content of the works contrasts excitingly with the reduction of the means of drawing. Fuhrer’s drawings consist purely of hatchings, which she draws in variable line widths and superimpositions in one direction on the sheet. Despite the delicacy of the lines, her figures and forms are characterised by an astonishing plasticity as they emerge without contours from the white paper. As in photography, which the artist often uses as a starting point for her charcoal drawings, light and shadow, texture and blank space constitute the image, from which a magical effect seems to emanate, because it is capable of a space between memory and imagination.

Noi Fuhrer studied at Goldsmiths College in London and from 2019 - 2021 in the class of Andreas Slominski at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg.

On Watch, 2022
Charcoal on paper
121 x 131 cm

Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg
Photo: Noi Fuhrer, Berlin

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