Art Review: Gerard Waskievitz at Bleibtreudrei Raum, Berlin

The Painting That Inhabits: Gerard Waskievitz

Exhibition review: Alles Farbe, bleibtreudrei Raum für Kunst, Bleibtreustraße 3, Charlottenburg, Berlin. March 13 – April 13, 2026. Part of Charlottenwalk 2026.

I walked into bleibtreudrei Raum für Kunst and the paint arrived before I did. The weight before the form, the carnality of the surface before any possible reading. The works of Gerard Waskievitz reach the body before they reach thought.

Gerard Waskievitz was born in Poland in 1962, studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Essen, and lives and works in Berlin. He paints in oil and egg tempera, and uses pentimento as method: layers accumulate, earlier sketches bleed through the final surface, and what the paint conceals remains visible beneath, pressing from within.

In times dominated by artificial intelligence and images that are consumed before they are seen, Waskievitz moves in the opposite direction, and it is precisely in this tension that the strength of his work lies. To choose painting today, to choose the body, the gesture, the slow accumulation of pigment on canvas, is a position. This insistence on what has weight, on what demands presence, in an era when the image has become surface without reverse, circulation without friction, contact without contact.

The large-scale works settle into the space with an immediate physical presence. The figures are close to life-size, and what happens between them and whoever sees them resists any analysis prepared in advance. What you find is not entirely legible. Faces remain unresolved, figures inhabit situations the painting deliberately leaves unnamed, backgrounds oscillate between exterior landscape and interior state without settling into either. Waskievitz devoured the post-World War I painters, and what pulses in the canvases are the fragmented figures and group compositions where bodies share a space that does not make them proximate, each sealed in a solitude that physical nearness cannot dissolve. The pressure lives in the paint itself, in the density of pigment, in the drips that record the time of the gesture, and also in the distortion of forms, which strains like something yielding under a weight that does not announce itself.

Those who know the history of painting will recognize that Waskievitz devoured much more than a generation. What pulses in the canvases is made of layers that span centuries. The light that emerges from dark matter rather than falling upon it, the pigment that exists as weight before it exists as color, the figures that inhabit shadow as much as visibility, this is the seventeenth century working from inside, Rembrandt and Velázquez digested, their erosions and disappearances still active beneath the surface. Then the nineteenth century: figures that escape the scene containing them, present and ungraspable, looking out from inside a space the narrative cannot close over them, bodies in landscapes that offer no consolation, no geometry of refuge. Manet and Cézanne, swallowed whole. And over all of it, the weight of a century of wars, the solitude of figures that share space without touching, an atmosphere that does not announce its origins but presses from within.

Of all the works in Alles Farbe, it was Tiger in der Landschaft (2025) that did not let me leave. A figure stands at the center, wearing a leopard-print coat, sneakers, fully of now, surrounded by a garden that belongs to no time at all. Mythical creatures dissolve into vegetation, trees bleed into sky, flowers press forward with a carnality that the figure absorbs without reacting. And the face, as in all of Waskievitz’s work, is not there. Not erased. Simply never arrived. This figure exists through its clothes, its stance, the impossible world that has grown around it. It was this painting that made the studio visit necessary.

In the studio, the smaller landscapes stay on the walls around the large canvases, as if the painting could not fit inside the formats, as if the gesture continued past the edge, infecting the space, making the entire studio a surface in process. The more contained portraits, precise and luminous, reveal the full range of Waskievitz’s command: every incompletion in the large canvases is a decision sustained by a hand that knows what it is opening. What moves that hand separates the image from its explanation, opens gaps and interruptions. Color acts as its own language, modulating intensity and meaning without recourse to description. The ochre-yellow that runs through distinct series is an emotional frequency, the color of light in Flemish interiors, of desacralized medieval gold, of southern sun filtered through northern memory. Blue appears always in tension with that yellow, as antagonist: the other time, the shadow, what endures beneath the warmth. Paint and surface carry the weight of a long history without bowing to it, and it is in that refusal of reverence that each work finds its carnality.

The real in these works is never fully actualized, and it is in the faces that this becomes unbearable. The face is where we expect the subject, where identity fixes itself, where the other calls us. In Waskievitz the face is there but does not surrender. It is not erasure, not absence. It is a presence that refuses fixation, a figure that exists as force before it exists as person. The female figures carry this condition with particular intensity: present and ungraspable, they look out from inside a space the painting’s narrative cannot close over them, inhabiting the canvas as a site of refusal rather than representation. What pulses in these faceless faces is exactly what Deleuze would call the virtual, not what is missing, but what exceeds what is visible, what the paint holds at the surface without letting actualize. The thickness of the pigment, the form that interrupts itself before completing, the eyes that do not look back because they have not yet fully arrived, all of it sustains the painting open, in process even after it is finished, carrying a humanity that does not allow itself to be named.

Waskievitz paints space as time. Space and time as a single condition: a field where every gesture accumulates, where earlier layers press through the surface, where the figure painted yesterday bleeds into the figure being painted today. To stand before these canvases is to stand inside something that thickens rather than passes. The paint is this thickness, made visible, made carnal, made pressurized. The body in the painting and the body in front of it share the same condition: both made of everything that came before, both in the middle of something still unfinished. It is precisely this temporal density that makes Waskievitz’s painting political in the deepest sense: structurally resistant to the logic of the disposable.

The German Expressionists painted in a world in ruins, after a war that showed what humanity is capable of. Since 2015 we have been living its return, the far right advancing, wars, bodies counted with indifference, fear settled into the daily life of those who make art, who think, who still believe that painting is a political act. Waskievitz looks at this world and makes others in the imagination, and returns with a painting that inhabits chaos, moves through it, and in that slow and carnal time of paint on canvas, creates another world, unreal and absolutely present.

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