Drawing Room, in cooperation with the PArt Foundation, is presenting the exhibition Trees / Headlines / Heads, featuring twelve drawings, six woodcuts and five sculptures by William Kentridge. With his drawings from the series Lexicon of Trees, Kentridge revisits one of the central motifs of his oeuvre – the tree as a symbol of memory, growth and rootedness. The combination of black ink and the yellowed pages of an old dictionary creates a tension between language and nature, knowledge and transience, which reflects Kentridge's artistic thinking in small format. The edition ‘Headlines’ presents a series of woodcuts printed over reproductions of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper from 1 February 1916. That month, the Cabaret Voltaire opened in Zurich. This date marks the beginning of a radically new artistic way of thinking that manifested itself not only in the visual arts, but also in theatre, literature and performance – a new understanding of the world and expression. In terms of content, Kentridge links historical and contemporary references: some texts are taken from Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto of 1916, others from the opening lines of Kurt Schwitters' Dadaist Ursonate of 1932. Another reference leads to THE CENTRE FOR THE LESS GOOD IDEA, an experimental art centre founded by Kentridge in Johannesburg. The edition ‘Five Heads for Zurich, 1916’ is a five-part series of sculptural prints. These three-dimensional lithographs portray five personalities who were in Zurich in 1916: the Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball, the writer James Joyce, and Vladimir Lenin.

William Kentridge (born 1955 in Johannesburg) is one of the world's most important and established contemporary artists. He works in the media of drawing, literature, film, performance, music, theatre and cross-media concepts. His work is rooted in politics, science, literature and history, and always leaves room for contradiction and uncertainty.

William Kentridge
Lexicon of Trees; VII, 2025
Indian ink on found pages
30.5 x 22.3 cm

Photo: Helge Mundt, Hamburg
Courtesy: William Kentridge, PArt Foundation and Drawing Room, Hamburg

Drawing Room is delighted to present Jakob Spengemann's exhibition ‘chirping sharply quite loudly’. On display (and audible) are nests and a new series of drip paintings with musical instructions that transform the exhibition space into a performative venue where animal and human actions and sounds intertwine.
Spengemann's starting point for the drip paintings is the bird catcher's aria from Mozart's Magic Flute and its performance instructions. For this new series of works, Spengemann combined various references that bring us closer to the ‘transcription’ of sounds: musical performance markings, linguistic images from art and poetry, scientific terms and quotations from pop culture. From these, the artist has developed a charming score in which the focus is not on the interpretative authority of the terms, but on their potential for ambiguity. In music, for example, ‘con ebollizione’ – literally ‘in turmoil’ – refers to a specific playing style. Without reading the actual notes, however, the same expression can also be understood in a different context as a commentary that goes beyond the purely musical.

Jakob Spengemann
Sotto Voce, 2025
Resin, ink on music paper
43 x 60 x 1 cm

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

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We are delighted to announce Mariella Mosler's 12-month art project “In a Year with 13 Moons”. Her current project, ‘In a Year with 13 Moons,’ combines cosmic cycles with urban space: at 13 selected locations in Hamburg's urban space (for example, on an dry dock of the traditional shipyard Heinrich Buschmann and Sons), Mosler stages thirteen stainless steel discs covered with silver leaf as glowing moons, thus exploring the timeless power of the moon on the human unconscious. The moon embodies the forces of the night, dreams and access to the unconscious. While the city is subject to constant change, the moon remains a universal and constant image of human longing. Further information on all locations and background details can be found on the project website: www.13monde.info

Mariella Mosler
In a Year with 13 Moons, 2025

Photo: Mariella Mosler, Hamburg
Courtesy: The artist and Drawing Room, Hamburg

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Drawing Room is delighted to present Nadine Fecht’s first solo exhibition in Hamburg. Entitled Between the Black of Olives and Lunar Blue, it shows new figurative as well as non-representational drawings by the conceptual artist from Berlin. The figurative sheets in particular, drawn using blueprint paper, deal with female identity, physicality and self-empowerment. The framed drawings are hung on a wall papered with two repeating poster motifs. The exhibition title refers to a monochrome shade distributed across the walls of the exhibition space in large-format posters. The second poster motif documents several reports from Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) operations carried out since 2021. The inclusion of figurative drawings and portraits is rather unusual for Nadine Fecht’s work. This group of works can be seen as a finely drawn ensemble on the main wall, highlighting the aspect of the individual; the individual’s personal confrontation with themselves and their environment against the backdrop of major global themes. In a second group of drawings and collages on the opposite wall, Fecht explores the desire for freedom and the capacity for optimism in a series of seemingly detached and weightless sheets, each one of which, and even more so en bloc, explores and reveals new rules and possibilities for creativity, thus emerging as a model of more open ideas and creativity that ought to be applied more frequently in social reality.

Nadine Fecht
Untitled, 2025
Blueprint drawing on paper
44,6 x 32,3 cm

Scan: Nadine Fecht, Berlin
Courtesy: Nadine Fecht, Berlin and Drawing Room, Hamburg

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Most artists endure a frugal life because they participate in something almost sacred: human creativity. So they accept an existence under pressure, full of missions and self-exploitation. The two films »OPEN CALL« and »Anima Overdrive« and the associated installation by the artist duo Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, who live in Berlin and Hamburg, revolve around these themes. Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler work together on transdisciplinary, post-cinematic projects that include filmic elements and sculptural, site-specific installations. They examine the hypermedia character of our present, the (power) structures behind the processes of digitalization and their effects on our thinking and our bodies, as well as everyday racism and the increasing precarization of working conditions. Current video installations, performances and films are shown at international festivals and in solo and group exhibitions. shown in solo and group exhibitions. Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler are among the prizewinners who will take up a ten-month scholarship at Villa Massimo (Rome Prize) from September 2025.

Stefan Panhans / Andrea Winkler
Anima Overdrive, 2023
Film Still

Foto: Stefan Panhans / Andrea Winkler, Berlin & Hamburg
Courtesy: Die Künstler and Drawing Room, Hamburg

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In his first solo exhibition at the Drawing Room, Cologne-based Christof John presents six works from the years 2022 to 2024, which were created in countless layers of oil, acrylic and pencil on MDF panels. The application and removal of colour is an essential part of the pictorial genesis. John's paintings are characterised by geometric elements that are juxtaposed with organically soft surfaces. Their structures, grids and patterns with a harsh alternation of colours are precise and blurred at the same time; they are reminiscent of a textile fabric. In the rhythmic harmony of individual lines, dots or squares, which fill the entire painting surface as an all-over and can also form small ‘running stitches’, knots or links, the artist creates a virtuoso interplay of figure and ground as well as cut-outs and cut-ins. John's paintings invite the viewer to engage in this painterly game between difference and indifference. He himself speaks of wanting to create a ‘never-ending picture’. Christof John, born in Hanover in 1984, lives and works in Cologne. From 2006 to 2012, he studied at the Braunschweig University of Art, where he graduated as a master student of Professor Walter Dahn. Christof John is one of the eight nominees for this year's Bremer Pauli Prize. The competition exhibition can be seen at the Bremen Kunsthalle until 13 October.

Christof John
Untitled (Ticket XVII/1), 2022
Oil, acrylic, pencil, mdf
180 x 130 x 5 cm

Photo: Mareike Tocha, Cologne
Courtesy: Christof John, Cologne and Drawing Room, Hamburg

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In her first solo exhibition at the Drawing Room, Duisburg-born and Cologne-based artist Nora Schattauer presents two tableaux with works on paper from 2011 to 2024. Schattauer works with chemical solutions, mineral salts and acids, which are applied to the paper in a controlled manner with a pipette, in such a way that an almost regular, constantly varied pattern forms the basic framework. As the substances penetrate the image carrier, they gain visual depth and thus become a kind of physical resonance surface. They react with the unglued paper, form bonds and are subject to subsequent colour changes. This "reaction process" often gives the works a fluid character; the artist herself speaks of "controlled chance". Although Schattauer cannot completely anticipate the result, empirical values allow her to control it in a variety of ways. Structured composition and colourful appearance are indissolubly interwoven in Schattauer's works. The microscopic variety of forms evokes associations with nature, the pulsation and oscillation conjures up memories of processual procedures. The variety of forms and the colour gradations are almost unlimited. The shapes appear like apparitions that, having come to rest for a moment, can withdraw again – the openness, the potential for change seems to be inscribed in the pictures.

Nora Schattauer
Untitled (colourless white 4), 2022
salt solutions on chromatography paper
30 x 20 cm

Photo: Nora Schattauer, Cologne
Courtesy: Nora Schattauer, Cologne and Drawing Room, Hamburg

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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

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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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