Galleries

EXHIBITION REVIEW / CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE

Arcana: The Lion of the New Horizon. Stone, Spirit, and Memory in the Work of Andrea da Montefeltro

At the Castello dei Conti Oliva in Piandimeleto, a major anthology curated by Annalisa Di Maria explores Neoplatonism and the universal roots of humanity through the sculptural mastery of Andrea da Montefeltro.

Editorial Staff  |  Piandimeleto (PU)  |  July 10, 2026

There is a material that knows no time. It traverses centuries without ever betraying itself, silently safeguarding the memory of civilizations, the breath of landscapes, and the labor of human hands. This material is stone. It is from stone—and its stubborn fidelity to its own nature—that the artistic research of Andrea da Montefeltro takes shape. He is the protagonist of a major national exhibition at the Castello dei Conti Oliva in Piandimeleto, titled ARCANA: The Lion of the New Horizon.

The exhibition, which opened on July 10, 2026, and will be on display until September 30 in the frescoed halls of one of the most evocative architectural landmarks in the Montefeltro region, acts as an authentic pilgrimage for the eyes. Under the artistic direction of Annalisa Di Maria—an internationally renowned scholar and one of the world’s leading experts on Leonardo da Vinci and Neoplatonic thought—the event restores to art its original vocation: to be a tool for thought, dialogue, and knowledge.

The Symbiosis of Matter and Spirit

The stone that Andrea polishes and chisels with delicate mastery is pierced and opened from within, resulting in airy lightness, almost suspended in nothingness. It is a perfect symbiosis between raw material and the artist’s hand, emphasizing the skill of one who adopts stone as a “matter/symbol” for profound, polyvalent, and piercing messages. Before these sculptures, light-years away from commercial logic and the ephemeral trends of the contemporary world, it becomes impossible to dismiss the work with the common superficial remark: “What’s the big deal, I could have done that too.”

The artist does not merely show; he incessantly has something to tell. His works are not mere aesthetic exercises, but “arks of knowledge.” In this journey, the challenge to the unknown, as an innate human need, manifests through cultured and powerful references: from the myth of divided between Templars and Saracens in an ancient struggle that retains its dramatic contemporary relevance.Odysseus in The Bow of No One to the rigorous metaphor of the Chessboard, where pawns are 

“The future is not born from the erasure of memory, but from the ability to recognize, preserve, and transform it into a new possibility for dialogue.”

Neoplatonism and Renaissance in the Montefeltro

The choice of the Castello dei Conti Oliva is not accidental. For over five centuries, this residence dominated the Foglia Valley, a Renaissance crossroads of ideas and culture in dialogue with Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, and the great Italian courts. In this setting, ARCANA reties the thread to the past, proposing a New Humanism founded on responsibility and the centrality of the person.

As artistic director Annalisa Di Maria emphasizes, Neoplatonism is not reduced here to a decorative repertoire or an exhibition slogan: “It is one of the highest philosophical elaborations of Western civilization, capable of putting art, science, spirituality, and the search for truth into dialogue.” The exhibition, created by the Municipality of Piandimeleto with the patronage of the Marche Region and the support of the Florence UNESCO Club, is an official part of the national journey marking the 800th Anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, featuring a section dedicated to the values of peace, brotherhood, and harmony with Creation.

A Solitary Navigator Between Myth and Modernity

Andrea da Montefeltro moves through today’s landscape as a solitary navigator guided by the North Star of art’s deep roots. Works such as The Swans or The Celestial Hierarchy appear as a Divine Comedy imagined and sculpted in rock. The baskets of daily food products, which recall the lessons of Arcimboldo and the great past masters like Mantegna and the Della Robbia, open onto a global Eden that goes far beyond consumption, questioning the observer on major ethical, metaphysical, and ecological themes.

In an age dominated by the ephemeral and by the carpe diem mentality, this sculptural body of work reminds us that art is called upon to offer a fundamental contribution to the culture of a conscious existence. Under his blows, stone ceases to be inert matter and becomes a vigilant guardian of the past and a prophecy of a new human horizon.

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

Title	ARCANA — The Lion of the New Horizon. National exhibition by Andrea da Montefeltro
Artistic Direction	Annalisa Di Maria
Venue	Castello dei Conti Oliva, Piandimeleto (PU)
Dates	July 10 – September 30, 2026
Hours	Every day: 9:00 – 12:00 | 16:30 – 18:30 (Guided tours with the artist upon reservation)
Patronage	Municipality of Piandimeleto, Marche Region, Florence UNESCO Club

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What the Directory Contained. What Art Dreams

A Critical Essay on the Pop-up Exhibition “When Artists Talk to Telephone Books and These Respond to Them: PTT Archive Meets Wikipedia – Telephone Directory Stories from the Past” Museum of Communication, Bern, 19–29 May 2026

Organized by Sandra Becker (GLAM Lead, Wikimedia CH) and Heike Bazak (Director, PTT Archive Bern) in the framework of the CoCreation Project, Wikimedia CH, in partnership with the PTT Archive and the Museum of Communication Presented on the occasion of International Museum Day 2026, International Council of Museums (ICOM)

by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style Magazine

Start with the ear.
A ceramic ear, cream-white, anatomically faithful, sits under a vitrine in a darkened hall in Bern. It is approximately the size of a large hand. It is not attached to anything. The ear outside the head is, in the tradition of surrealist anatomical fragmentation, an organ that has become a thing, separated from the body that gave it function and placed under glass like a specimen from a collection whose logic has been lost.

There is another ear in art history. Van Gogh cut his and offered it to Gabrielle Berlatier, who worked at a brothel in Arles, a gesture so excessive and so strange that it has never been fully explained, only endlessly interpreted. What is certain is that the severed ear is not a symbol of loss of hearing. It is a symbol of hearing taken to its limit, of a sensitivity so acute it became unbearable and had to be removed. Yara Noémie Schaub’s ceramic ear seems to belong to this lineage.

Schaub made this ear to accompany a sound installation that translates telephone directory pages from Bern in 1926 and 2021 into rhythm. The directories are ninety-five years apart. What changes between them is who appears: names migrate, multiply, diversify, contract, vanish. The sound does not narrate this. It does not illustrate demographic change. It produces a trance-like acoustic environment that spreads through the entire exhibition space, contaminating the other works, seeping into the boxes and the spheres and the painted blueprints and the annotated directory pages until the whole room is slightly submerged in it. What the sound does in the room is closer to what Hugo Ball did at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, standing at the podium in a cardboard tube costume, producing syllables that belonged to no language and therefore to all of them simultaneously. Ball understood that sound could reach the nervous system before meaning could intercept it. Schaub’s number-rhythms operate on the same principle. They are not music and not speech and not noise. They are duration made audible, a century compressed into pattern. Whether the translation methodology produces results that are listenable rather than merely conceptually valid is a question the installation leaves genuinely open: what saves it is the ceramic ear, which converts that openness into a physical proposition about the body and its limits.

Standing in front of it, a critic who grew up in Brazil in the 1990s thinks involuntarily of the orelhão, the public telephone booth shaped like a giant orange ear that lined every Brazilian street corner and square for three decades. You put a token in, you pressed your ear against the receiver, the city noise dropped away, and for a moment you were connected to someone elsewhere. The orelhão is gone now, replaced by the phone in the pocket, and with it went a particular quality of public intimacy, of strangers standing close enough to overhear each other’s most private conversations while pretending not to. Schaub’s ceramic ear holds some of that loss without knowing it. The work comes from a Swiss archive, but the ear is the ear, and the ear remembers everything it has ever been used for.

Small boxes.
Violetta Vollrath’s Reliquienschrein analog (2026) is constructed from discarded institutional cardboard, its exterior borders decorated with watercolor drawings of umbrellas, fire extinguishers, insects, lightning bolts, document clips. Inside: fragments of old telephone directories under plastic sheeting, the residual hardware of archival processing, the small detritus of institutional maintenance. It sits under a vitrine like a reliquary, which is what it is, a container for something that has been decided to be sacred.

Standing in front of it, one wants to be inside it. Not metaphorically. Physically inside, reduced to the scale of the objects it contains, living among the telephone directory fragments and the discarded document clips as if they were furniture. This desire is not rational and it is not critical and it belongs entirely to the work. Something in the scale of the object, its handmade quality, the care given to the decorative border of umbrellas and fire extinguishers, produces a longing for smallness, for the protected interior, for the condition of being contained rather than containing. The reliquary is a house for the sacred. Vollrath’s reliquary is a house for the discarded.

What makes this theologically precise rather than merely poetic is the history of the reliquary form itself. The medieval goldsmith who constructed a container for a fragment of bone understood that holiness is not in the object but in the decision to treat the object as holy, to surround it with labor and material that exceed its intrinsic worth. The relic does not make itself sacred; the reliquary does. Vollrath uses the cheapest possible materials to perform this mechanism: cardboard, watercolor, plastic sheeting, discarded clips. The border of umbrellas and fire extinguishers, drawn with the care one gives to illuminated manuscript ornament, does not illustrate the contents. It declares them worthy of this frame.

The sacred here is not metaphysical. It is historical. Inside Vollrath’s boxes are the material traces of communication systems that organized daily life for over a century and are now obsolete. The telephone directory, the scanner, the document clip: these are the technologies through which people located each other, reached each other, filed each other into manageable order. Their obsolescence is not neutral. It marks the end of a particular form of collective legibility, of the kind that Karl Schlögel described as the expression of open society, a society in which everyone who participated in the communication system was equally named and equally findable. Whether the digital systems that replaced them are equally democratic is a question the reliquaries pose by preserving what they replaced. Religuienschrein digital (2025) extends this into electronic components and CDs. It is less resolved than the analog version. Digital materials carry their own question: whether a file can be mourned the way a document can be mourned, whether data has a body that can decay and leave traces the way paper does. The question is not rhetorical. The CDs inside the box are already an obsolete format. In twenty years they will be as unreadable as a wax cylinder. Vollrath’s digital reliquary exists inside that timeline.

The third box, Reisegescheren analog (2024), contains scanner components and travel scissors, the instruments of archival transformation placed inside an archival container. The scanner converts the analog into the digital; the scissors cut one thing from another. Both are now inside a reliquary, preserved alongside what they once processed. The circularity is the argument.

A boy of nine loses his father.
The war has been over for some years but its afterlife is long and the family it leaves behind is a family missing one of them. The boy travels to Switzerland for summer stays with a host family, a country that is not his country, people who are not his people. He is a guest. He is happy there. He is a little boy and the world has recently demonstrated its capacity for catastrophe and he is spending the summer in a country that stayed largely intact while his did not. The Swiss family becomes his family. His children will visit them. The connection that began as humanitarian hospitality during a war’s aftermath became something the war could not have predicted: a family that chose itself.

Kim Dotty Hachmann’s war child (2026) is presented on a screen set into the surface of a Bibliothek PTT cart, a battered wooden trolley on metal wheels that has traveled through institutional corridors for decades. The viewer stands over the screen, looking down.

Somewhere in the PTT Archive there is a telephone directory that lists the address of the Swiss family. Name, street, number. The directory confirms that they existed, that they lived where they lived, that they were part of the connective tissue of a country that briefly received a child from elsewhere. The directory can confirm this. What it cannot confirm is the particular quality of that arrival, what it meant to be nine years old and already acquainted with catastrophe and to spend a summer somewhere that functions. The boy grew up, told the story to his children, and died. Hachmann made a film from what he told them and from what the archive could verify, which are not the same materials even when they describe the same events.

The video moves through architectural interiors, railway station clocks, winter tree branches in black and white. It does not reconstruct the summers. It moves through the visual residue of a history recovered partly from documents and partly from a father’s voice, now also gone. The trolley as plinth forces a posture of examination. You stand over the screen looking down, the posture of someone reading a document, but what you are reading is not a document. It is a story the father told his daughter, and it is the daughter’s grief for the father, and it is a film that sits inside a cart that was itself once used to move the archives of the telephone system through institutional space. The layering is structural. The film is made of what remained.

The work does not sentimentalize. This is its discipline. There is a version of this story that would insist on its own emotional weight, that would reconstruct the Swiss summers with warm light and period detail. Hachmann refuses that version. The video is cold and precise and the coldness is not distance. It is the specific temperature of grief for something that was also happy, for a loss that sits alongside a genuine gift.

To dream. To imagine.
Sandra Becker’s ceiling installation, Kristallkugeln der Zukunft (2025), hangs transparent plastic spheres at varying heights above the exhibition floor, each containing small objects: Hama bead constructions assembled from small fused plastic beads in primary colors, fragments of white lace, pixel patterns built from individual colored units. The spheres are clear and light catches inside them differently depending on where you stand. They reflect the entire hall in their curved surfaces, compressing the room into miniature inside each one: the pedestals, the carts, the yellow-lit panels of the permanent exhibition, the other visitors. Each sphere is a world that contains the world that contains it.

Gaston Bachelard understood that smallness is not diminishment but concentration, that the miniature holds more than the large because it forces the imagination to complete what the eye cannot see. The spheres operate on this principle. They are small enough to hold everything the archive contains and everything it excludes: the names that were listed and the names that were not, the lives that passed through without leaving a directory entry because they moved too often or could not afford a subscription or bore names the orthographic system could not process. Histories, wars, marriages, migrations, different epochs sealed inside transparent shells, floating above the pedestals like planets whose atmospheres are made of collective memory and craft.

Becker’s blueprint work, The Body is the Message (2025), takes a technical drawing of the Hausrohrpoststation II Zürich and crosses it with a painted orange spiral. The title invokes McLuhan, and the invocation is exact: the pneumatic tube postal station is precisely a medium that became its own message, a system so efficient at routing physical objects that it made the human messenger redundant. The painted orange spiral is wide and fluid against the blueprint’s thin precise lines. It moves across the surface without following the routes the document prescribes. The orange lines carry the presence of the people whose names filled the telephone directories, who were listed and numbered and made findable by the same system this blueprint was designed to serve. The directory gave them addresses. The blueprint organized the infrastructure through which those addresses were reached. The spiral is what neither document could hold: a life that has an address, a number, a place in the system, and that exceeds all of it. Deleuze argued that art is not communication, that it produces sensation rather than transmitting information. The distinction matters here because Becker is showing this work in the Museum of Communication, an institution whose entire curatorial logic is built on the history of transmission, on the progressive development of systems for sending messages from one point to another. The spiral painted over the blueprint of a communication infrastructure proposes something that institution cannot fully accommodate: that what moved through these systems was not messages but people, and that the difference between the two is where art begins.

The notebooks, Die Telefonzellen (2025) and Die Telefonistin (2026), hold the exhibition’s most speculative gesture. Die Telefonistin opens to pencil sketches of faces annotated “Death mask out of blended metal, Chimú-culture, North Perú.” The connection it draws, between Swiss postal infrastructure and pre-Columbian funerary technology, runs through the shared logic of the mask as container for a face, a technology for preserving the features of the dead so that the living can continue to address them. It also runs through a history of labor: the telefonistin, the telephone operator, was almost always a woman, and her voice was the medium through which the directory’s list of names became actual connection. The death mask preserves the face. The telephone preserved the voice.

Archives and Dada.
Judith Boy draws directly on the archival surface. Chanukke für Mahatma Scholem (2020) lays a menorah in green and gold across open pages of a wartime telephone directory, placing the Magen David at the center and a small photographic fragment of barbed wire in the lower left corner. The names beneath the drawn forms are Jewish names, identified through Boy’s research in the archive. They are not obscured. They remain legible. The menorah is drawn over them and they persist through it.

Boy has spoken of her debt to Dada, and the connection runs most precisely through Hannah Höch, whose From an Ethnographic Museum series (1924-1930) cut directly into the visual archives of colonial classification, placing bodies and fragments in configurations the archive never intended and could not contain. Höch understood that the institutional document is never neutral, that its surfaces carry the logic of the system that produced it, and that working directly on those surfaces rather than reproducing them from a critical distance is a different kind of claim. Boy operates on the same principle. The telephone directory is not reproduced or cited. It is marked. The menorah drawn across the names does not illustrate loss. It occupies the document, insisting that it belongs to those it registered.

The telephone directory confirmed that a community was present, that its members had addresses and telephone numbers and civic existence. A different bureaucratic system, organized with equal precision, equally alphabetical in its logic, was simultaneously working to end that civic existence. The two systems were contemporaneous. They drew on the same demographic reality. Boy’s formal decision to draw directly onto the archival page rather than reproduce it alters the document permanently. The archive now holds something that was not there before. This is a claim: that the document belongs to those it registered, that the archive does not own the lives it contains.

Klimax Wandel Mythos Back layers Arabic script over German directory columns, pine trees, a coiling white paper snake, lips, a ceiling fan, tropical vegetation. The directory transcribed all names into German orthography regardless of their origin. A name that arrived in Arabic, Turkish, or Serbo-Croatian was processed into the form the system could manage. The original name was not preserved. Boy’s layering places Arabic script back onto a surface built to exclude it, and the visual density that results is not chaos but argument: the directory page was never as monolingual as it claimed to be, and the names it standardized into German columns carried languages, histories, and geographies the columns could not hold.

The International Council of Museums has organized International Museum Day for over forty years. The theme for 2026 is Museums Uniting a Divided World. The choice of words deserves scrutiny. Not museums interpreting a divided world, or documenting one, or making its divisions visible. Uniting.

The divisions in question are not abstract. They are wars whose territorial logic recalls the mid-twentieth century, border regimes tightening across Europe, the reorganization of global power along axes that the post-Cold War settlement declared obsolete. The geopolitical world of 2026 resembles, in some respects, the world in which the telephone directory first appeared: a world of nation-states asserting sovereignty over populations, over territory, over who belongs where and under what name. The directory listed everyone. Other systems, operating on the same data, decided that listing was not enough.

Into this moment, the ICOM places the museum as a unifying institution. Museums do hold things that would otherwise be lost, do create conditions for encounters with materials that resist the simplifications of the present. But what this exhibition proposes is something more specific than preservation. The collaboration between Wikimedia CH and the PTT Archive was conceived precisely as a counter- movement: to take an archive built on the mathematical logic of classification, on the reduction of lives to names and numbers in alphabetical columns, and open it to artistic practices that read it differently. The same infrastructure that connected also sorted, also excluded, also made certain bodies more findable than others wanted them to be. What these five artists do is turn that infrastructure against itself, extracting from its columns what the columns were not designed to show.

Wikimedia CH’s model of open-source, collectively produced knowledge carries its own proposition about democratic access to information, one that rhymes with the telephone directory’s original democratic logic and pushes it further: knowledge that belongs to no institution, that can be edited, contested, expanded by anyone. The collaboration between Wikimedia and the PTT Archive is the exhibition’s least examined structural decision, and it is the one with the most political content. It places the archive’s materials inside a system of circulation that the archive itself was never built for.

What these five artists found in seventy meters of Swiss telephone directories is not unity. It is density: the density of lives that passed through a system designed to make them findable, and the irreducible excess of those lives over the data the system produced. That excess is what art reaches.

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Dr. Wilbertz: An Art Historical Essay on the Exhibition IMPERFEKT

by Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer, MAERZ Gallery

“Due regard will be paid to durability when the foundations are carried down to solid ground and when the materials, of whatever kind, are carefully selected and applied without parsimony.”

Vitruvius, De Architectura Libri Decem, Book I, Chapter 3 (c. 33–14 BC)

For the ancient architectural theorist Vitruvius, firmitas (durability) constitutes the foundation—and the first category—of all built reality. It is not only a prerequisite for the utility and function of what is built, but also for its aesthetic quality and effect. A well-constructed building designed for permanence provides people with security, protection, and a sense of belonging. It is closely linked to our notions of beauty.

Structural damage, ruptures, and defects are indicators of decay and destruction. They manifest themselves on the surface of a building, yet their causes often lie hidden deep within its inaccessible structural substance. Our dwellings are indispensable foundations of human existence. When they become fragile or damaged, this results in a tangible sense of uncertainty and disturbance to our psychological well-being. The unconscious is triggered; we lose stability.

Rainer Nöbauer’s body of work IMPERFEKT addresses precisely these conditions and thus becomes a symbolic reflection of a reality that is becoming increasingly unstable. The production and reception of images—particularly within digital environments and pseudo-valued product worlds—are becoming ever more perfected, while at the same time the social, cultural, and human principles that once provided stability and cohesion are losing their constitutive relevance. (Self-)destruction has become the new paradigm.

Since the early 1960s, the artistic strategies of the Nouveaux Réalistes have belonged to a broad and highly heterogeneous group of international positions that take materiality, its questioning, and the processes of damage and destruction as the starting point of artistic practice. Their target was the complacent saturation of postwar prosperity society, whose artistic production often exhausted itself in the aesthetic affirmation of a belated and frequently decorative understanding of modernity. The parallels to today’s oversaturated digital world are difficult to ignore.

Rainer Nöbauer employs artistic strategies of imitation and simulation without foregrounding his own authorial presence or artistic signature. The works in the IMPERFEKT series present themselves as an objectively conceived collection which, comparable to the moulages of the nineteenth century, displays fragments of an injured—or perhaps diseased—body (the house). Physical and chemical processes and their resulting manifestations are initiated, simulated, systematically explored, and presented as phenomena of quiet and undramatic destruction.

Framing, traditional modes of display, hanging methods, and the almost classical placement of the sculptures within the exhibition space are elements of a carefully considered presentation and musealization that initially render the damage and ruptures seemingly harmless. The same applies to the perfection of execution, which possesses considerable aestheticizing potential. The resulting “images” follow artistic and aesthetic principles associated with modernism both before and after 1945.

Abstraction, Informel, and autonomous processes of artistic formation give rise to works of remarkable graphic, painterly, and sculptural quality. These works demand to be taken seriously and should by no means be understood as ironic commentaries on the fragilities and injuries of the present. Rather, they seek to make visible the aesthetic and artistic potentials inherent in destructive processes without, in the literal sense, beautifying them.

If one engages with these works, they reveal that disturbing forces are at work beneath the surface— not only of what is built. Small and large catastrophes may be their consequence. The acceptance of the “ugly,” in opposition to the “classically beautiful,” and its artistic manifestations as part of existence and reality had already been articulated by Karl Rosenkranz in his Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853):

“This inner connection of the beautiful with the ugly as its self-destruction also establishes the possibility that the ugly may in turn negate itself; that, existing as the negative of the beautiful, it resolves its contradiction to beauty and returns to unity with it.”

Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853)

Few formulations could summarize Rainer Nöbauer’s artistic programme more aptly.

IMPERFEKT – The Beauty of Imperfection

Artist Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer’s new body of work is inspired by structural defects and signs of decay found in 20th- and 21st-century architecture. The damage, defects and structural injuries observable in these buildings are artistically and sculpturally reinterpreted and transformed into autonomous works of visual art.

IMPERFEKT deliberately transfers flaws and damage—typically regarded as negative phenomena—into the artistic media of sculpture, relief and graphic works. Fracture, flaw and damage are rendered visible and transformed into aesthetic qualities. This is achieved through complex and deliberate material processes and mechanical interventions that generate calculated flaws and damage within the works themselves. The result is cracks, spalling, instabilities, as well as accelerated oxidation and mould-growth processes. Further strategies of aestheticisation emerge through acts of collecting and museum display within the MAERZ space, newly reconfigured for the exhibition.

At a time of social upheaval and uncertainty, IMPERFEKT deliberately challenges the prevailing dogma of perfection, countering it with an aesthetic of underlying imperfection.

Biographie:

Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer was born in Linz in 1979. After training as a sculptor, he studied Fine Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Arts Linz. His artistic practice explores social attributions and conventions, using them to develop independent, often interdisciplinary approaches. By combining perspectives from the natural and cultural sciences with specific situations and contexts, his work challenges established categorisations and patterns of perception. Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer subtly develops an aesthetic of resistance without explicitly naming it as such.

His work has been recognised with awards and grants, most recently the State Grant for Fine Art from the Republic of Austria (2024). International exhibition and residency experience, including projects at CCA Glasgow, Salzburger Kunstverein, Transit Photographies Montpellier, Forum Stadtpark Graz, Stadtgalerie Bern, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Mana Contemporary New York and S.Y.P Art Space Tokyo. Lectures at the University of Art and Design Linz.

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Sous la Figure, La Plage: The Painting of Bertram Schilling at the Threshold of Abstraction

A booth, a banquet. TOP Berlin* at Supermarket 2026.

A critical essay on the paintings of Bertram Schilling exhibited at Supermarket 2026, Stockholm.

by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style Magazine

Night and hangover are the same god, just as Bertram Schilling’s paintings are. Intoxication dissolves the self, dissolves the protective distance between the critic and what he/she/they look(s) at, makes seeing hurt in a way sobriety refuses. There is a force that form carries without being able to contain it entirely, the charge that traverses the surface and undoes it from within. I needed this to enter Schilling’s canvases. His partner, brother, and friends prepared the ritual, the space for what the paintings would demand.

I came to Stockholm with the beautiful and painful mission of writing about Supermarket Independent Art Fair and, above all, about Schilling’s paintings. The fair: twenty years selling what has no price to those who did not come to buy. The Erskinehuset, in Slakthusområdet (the former abattoir district of Stockholm), is the right space for this. More than sixty artist-run initiatives from various countries, no galleries as intermediaries, no silent pressure of the collector circulating. A structure indifferent to the market’s expectations. Autonomy that produces work suspending immediate legibility, answerable to no one.

Writing about Schilling is painful because the absence that should organize the writing keeps pressing through it, the way the force presses through the surface of the canvases, collapsing the distance that would make criticism possible.

Plato’s Symposium works this way: thought about what matters only happens while the bodies are still at the table, while the conversation still finds reason to continue, while Eros, the force that moves between what is present and what is absent, holds the room. Last Friday, Schilling’s partner, Pernilla cooked for the group in Stockholm. There was wine. There were the paintings sent by his brother Clemens. The night was still open. Blanchot, in La Communauté inavouable (1983), wrote that there are communities that only exist in the sharing of loss, that form precisely where something irreparable happened and where no one pretends otherwise. That dinner was this: a feast that life makes possible only because the dead are inside it, active, present in every gesture of hospitality. The conversation circled around the present and the non-present, around that pulse of life which exists precisely because it does not conceal what is missing.

Bertram Schilling, Kim Dotty Hachmann, Matthias Roth, and Ricarda Wallhaeuser studied with the same Prof. Lobeck at Kunsthochschule Kassel in the 90s. They founded the artist initiative microwesten under the umbrella of TOP Berlin together. Schilling died in 2023. They placed the paintings on the walls of the booth. What those walls held is what this text attempts to approach.

When I stood before the works, I felt the cold first. The cold of Stockholm in April I already carried in my coat. This was another cold, older, coming from inside the paint. What I felt, the canvases had already decided beyond retrieval. Greys, desaturated blues, whites that weigh like compressed matter. According to his partner, Schilling was thinking about painting all the time, in the places he passed through, on the living room sofa. In his almost recognisable landscapes, painting was the way to register the ground beneath his feet as duration, as something that had happened to a body. The hand leaves a trace no subsequent interpretation can fully claim. The snow that recurs series upon series compresses the vegetation, the soil, the horizon line, removes the atmospheric buffer between form and the pressure form carries, leaves the pictorial elements exposed to the weight of what the painter chose not to resolve. It is a reduction, a simplification in reverse. What remains when the snow has passed is the skeleton of existence.

The contours are black and deliberate, holding the planes apart by force, refusing the atmospheric fusion that would be the easy consolation. Schilling’s canvases exist at the threshold between the recognisable and the irreducible: the landscape is almost there, almost nameable, and it is precisely this suspension, this refusal to resolve into either pure figuration or pure abstraction, that gives the surface its particular pressure. Here one feels Munch of the late Norwegian landscapes, where the horizon remains opaque to the eye, where the sky weighs on the earth like a question left standing. In those late works the paint surface carries its own gravity, the horizon a sealed line, as if landscape had decided it no longer needed to be entered. And De Staël: the figure that exists before knowing what it is, planes of colour suspended at the moment before the decision between abstract and figurative, the canvas that demands to be read in more than one direction, a refusal to resolve that the paint enforces from within.

And then I felt the solitude. Solitude inscribed on the surface by the hand, prior to any theme, and heavier than any. The black contour that keeps each plane at a distance from the others carries an entire worldview: things exist separately, the space between them is real, and the paint affirms it without apology. After solitude, fear. The plain fear of standing before a work that gazes back.

Didi-Huberman analyses this in Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992). Before certain surfaces, something resists our visual possession and looks back at us as a structural operation of the canvas. The argument emerges from an experience in front of Tony Smith’s minimalist works: black boxes that return something of the order of death, of the tomb, of what refuses to be possessed by the living. In Schilling’s canvases, this effect gains a still sharper precision because what the surface holds is the death of a specific person who painted there, who left the trace of the hand, who chose that quality of grey and not another. The canvas looks at us with the eyes of one who has gone. Lyotard, in Discours, Figure (1971), names the force that produces this effect from inside the image: sous la figure, le désir, a structural tension prior to any reading, which acts within the figure and prevents it from closing on itself as a complete sign, deforming it by a charge it carries without being able to absorb. For Lyotard, the visual field is traversed by a force that representation registers without domesticating. It is the pressure that form contains and does not exhaust. What Lyotard locates inside the canvas, Didi-Huberman locates in the interval between the canvas and whoever looks at it. They are the same movement seen from opposite sides of a vibrating surface.

And in this tension, in this compressed winter, in this solitude heavier than any theme, in this fear returned by the gaze, in this wine that dissolves the protective distance, I found something I did not expect. A freedom. Sous le pavé, la plage: as a pictorial condition, as what exists beneath the snow that compresses, beneath the contour that separates, beneath the weight of the horizon that resists the eye. There is a layer that form carries without being able to contain, an existence that presses the surface upward from below, that surges precisely where form reaches its limit. Schilling’s landscape is where existence appears raw, unadorned, with that strange freedom that only comes when there is no longer an illusion to sustain. A freedom of sky and flesh.

The booth as banquet: Schilling painted whole spaces of existence, and Kim and Matthias brought them to Stockholm so that they go on pressing against whoever stands before them. It is the force that Lyotard named and Didi-Huberman felt returned: the désir beneath the figure, the gaze that the surface sends back across the irreversible distance between the dead and the living, and that no subsequent interpretation can extinguish. The community that forms before these canvases is the same that formed at Pernilla’s table, what Blanchot called la communauté inavouable: the one that exists only because something irreparable happened. That instant passed. In Bertram Schilling’s paintings, the instant stayed. What stayed looks at us.

* TOP Berlin is a transdisciplinary collective based in Berlin. Bertram Schilling, Kim Dotty Hachmann, Ricarda Wallhaeuser and Matthias Roth, all graduated from the Kunsthochschule Kassel, University of Kassel, together with Julia Hürter formed the nomadic artist initiative microwesten around the year 2002. Bertram Schilling later established the artist projects “Being in the word” and “Mind map memory”. Bertram Schilling died 2023.

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HackelBury presents Ian McKeever: Seven Stones, an exhibition of photographs taken at the Neolithic Henge Monument in Avebury, Wiltshire.

Made in 2017 using a medium-format analogue camera and printed in 2025, these works reflect McKeever’s fascination with the physical presence of the stones; their mass and heft and the sense of time and permanence which they embody.

Seven Stones forms part of McKeever’s philosophical exploration and long-standing dialogue and symbiotic relationship between painting and photography, presence and absence, time and materiality.

“It’s the gap between an image and its presence that intrigues me”. IM

Rather than depicting the Avebury stone circle as landscape or monument, McKeever focuses on the presence of the stones: their physical mass, indomitable endurance, and radically non-human sense of time. The photographs do not attempt to encompass the site as a whole. Instead, McKeever moves close to the stones, cropping tightly, circling them and allowing their weight and density to assert themselves within the frame.

The photographs Seven Stones emerge directly from McKeever’s painting practice. Known primarily for his abstract paintings, McKeever frequently turns to photography not as a preparatory tool, but as a “reality check”: a way of affirming the world of sensation that his paintings pursue in more elusive, amorphous forms. While his paintings allow presence to remain latent and indeterminate, photography pins it down to a recognisable object. However, also recognising that a photograph as such is itself an abstraction, as is the painting. This gap between an object and an implied presence McKeever explored in his monumental painting series Henge Paintings 2017 – 2022.

“It is through the photograph that I have come to know myself and through the painting I have come to be myself”. IM

The tension between the fixity and certainty of the photographic image and the open-ended temporality of painting is central to McKeever’s work. A photograph holds a single, emphatically fixed moment in time, while a painting evolves across months or years, resisting completion and refusing to belong to either a single point in time or a single viewpoint.

Ian McKeever: Seven Stones invites viewers into a quiet but profound encounter with the stones as presences rather than images, asking how we register the world physically and sensorially and how art mediates between what is seen, what is felt, and what endures across time.

About Ian McKeever

Ian McKeever (British, b. 1946) emerged as an artist in the early 1970’s out of an interest in both conceptualism and abstract painting, the prevalent trends at the time. Although seeing himself primarily as a painter, this is informed by his ongoing engagement with photography. Not in the blurring of the boundary between the two disciplines, rather in seeing and understanding them as distinct visual languages.

McKeever received the DAAD scholarship in 1989 and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1990. He has exhibited internationally and has taught extensively in the UK, Germany, and the USA including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton.

Ian McKeever was elected a Royal Academician in 2003 and his work is represented in leading international public Collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Fine Art, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

About HackelBury Fine Art

HackelBury was founded twenty-seven years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier- Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Malick Sidibe, and Sebastião Salgado. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as William Klein, Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong.

In recent years the gallery has taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova, Alys Tomlinson, Coral Woodbury and Sharon Walters.

Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long term.

NOTES TO EDITORS

In May this year the Royal Academy will publish a book of the selected writings on art by Ian McKeever covering the period 1978 – 2025. The publication will have entries ranging from his travel journals to such places as Papua New Guinea and Greenland alongside essays on such artists as Piero della Francesca, Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Mitchell. This will be illustrated with a selection of sketchbook pages and photographs drawn from the artist’s travels and studio.

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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Curator: Shane Bradford
Dates: 2 May – 30 May, 2026

The art of joy as an act of resistance

Ancient philosophies of happiness, commonly (mis)translated as the state of eudaimonia, offer various pathways to personal contentedness, such as hedonism, stoicism, and epicureanism. Fast forward to the extreme now*, and a pure form of happiness proves a slippery conception, alluding even our best attempts at a common consensus.

Subjective experience and faith in the righteous path aside, we are left with a general feeling that happiness is real without really knowing how, or when, we’ve attained it. In The Global West, the commoditisation of happiness renders its fulfilment precariously in line with base rate inflation, and the broadening wealth gap. Confusion reigns, for without the exigence of discontent, what remedies can we sell?

Amidst this backdrop of pervasive Endcore* and the scarcity of optimism as a cultural resource, a personal state of happiness becomes a contrary force, like an act of resistance. State and late Capitalism, arguably once a means to life improvement, have shifted primary output from consumer goods to the production of fear. The presence of fear is a key catalyst of need, need a driver of desire, and desire the main force behind sales.

Art, at its best, has always served as a counterpoint to egomaniacal assumptions of permanence by every societal powerbroker from Nero to Napoleon. Thus, Radical Happiness speculates on how three exemplary early to-mid career painters enact resistance within the framework of painting, harnessing joy as opposition, and conjuring battlements of radical happiness against the prevailing politics of horror.

*Shumon Basar / Flash Art, #341, 2022

Billy Crosby engages with traditional Western tropes of the ‘pastoral’ in his work, as well as flirting with kawaii, the Japanese penchant for cuteness that has its furry little roots in shyness and vulnerability. Working across painting, as well as blockchain-based digital formats, Crosby transcends the mainstream popular discourse on AI, delivering an alternative aesthetic interpretation of technology’s more optimistic potential. Crosby held his first London solo show, entitled ‘The Meadow’ at Union in October, 2025.

Bunny Hennessey approaches the painted canvas as a site of heightened, embodied expression. Her work begins with first impulses of making, allowing sensation to be moved and held across the surface. Her paintings conjure a synaesthesia, where colour, gesture and texture register as overlapping sensory experiences. The notion of happiness, in Bunny’s hands, traces a weightless route to the stars whilst remaining grounded by her distinctly saturated and deliberately discordant colouration.

Isaac Andrews is a painter of touch, focusing on the poignant but fleeting moments in which human beings breach the social boundaries of intimacy and meaningfully connect with one another. Pleasure is profound, and the ability to isolate and savour life’s more caring acts runs contrary to the prevailing tide of cynical individualism. A bunch of flowers, a warm hug, these are the quotidian micro-events that forge a pathway to the universal experience of humanity. Isaac Andrews deftly singles out positive moments of personal connection as a counterpoint to global negativity.

Website: http://www.uniongallery.com

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Publishing in Art Style Magazine is free of charge for anyone. There are no article processing charges or other publication fees. Art Style Magazine is independent and supports the Open Access Movement. The editors of Art Style Magazine cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in essays and articles published on the Art Style Magazine’s website and editions. Authors agree to the terms and conditions and assure that their submissions are free of third parties’ rights. The views and opinions expressed in the essays and articles are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Art Style Magazine. The authors of Art Style Magazine’s essays and articles are responsible for its content. The Art Style Magazine‘s website provides links to third-party websites. However, the magazine is not responsible for the contents of those linked sites, nor for any link contained in the linked site content of external Internet sites (see Terms & Conditions).

The Pavilion of Ecuador at Biennale Arte 2026 presents Tawna & Oscar, an exhibition that challenges dominant ways of organizing life, knowledge, and territory. Featuring the Tawna collective and Oscar Santillán, and curated by Manuela Moscoso with the support of its commissioner, the Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art of Ecuador (MAAC), the project approaches art as a practice of attention.

Tawna & Oscar brings together the practices of Oscar Santillán and the Tawna collective to present two contemporary ways of thinking and making the world through relation. The project proposes an approach to art that moves away from fixed categories and closed hierarchies, focusing instead on processes of exchange that unfold across bodies, languages, territories, and times.

Curated by Manuela Moscoso, the Pavilion of Ecuador is conceived as a space of attention and listening. Rather than offering a single narrative, it invites visitors to slow down and engage with forms of knowledge that are often overlooked within dominant cultural frameworks. Emerging from Andean Amazonian territories marked by linguistic, cultural, and ecological plurality, the project advances a situated position that understands knowledge as something produced through shared experience and ongoing relation.

The practice of the Tawna collective is rooted in Pan-Amazonian ways of thinking that conceive existence as an active continuity among bodies, territories, and forces. Working from community-based and embodied experiences, Tawna understands sexuality and dreaming as sensitive technologies through which life is oriented, knowledge is transmitted, and care is organized. In their practice, language functions not as distant representation but as a living force that participates in the making of the world, activating connections between the personal, the collective, and the spiritual.

Oscar Santillán’s practice explores what exists beyond established notions of reality: those conditions that escape dominant systems of order and open other ways of perceiving the world. Moving across science, emerging technologies, and ancestral knowledge, his work insists on indeterminacy as a fundamental condition of life. From this perspective, the terrestrial, the technological, and the cosmic are understood as interconnected and continuously shaping one another.

The encounter between Tawna and Santillán does not aim for synthesis or resolution. Instead, it sustains an open space in which different ways of inhabiting and understanding the world can coexist without being reduced to a single framework. Art operates here as a practice that holds this openness, creating the conditions for new forms of perception, relation, and coexistence.

Rather than representing a fixed national identity, Tawna & Oscar proposes a contemporary position grounded in situated knowledge, relation, and material responsibility, offering tools to think with the present and imagine multiple possible worlds.

COMMISSIONER

The Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art (MAAC) is a key cultural institution in Ecuador, dedicated to preserving archaeological and modern heritage, promoting contemporary art, and serving as a bridge between the country’s historical memory and its present cultural landscape. As custodian of 60,000 pre-Hispanic archaeological objects and 3,500 works of modern and contemporary art, the MAAC fosters spaces for encounter, critical reflection, and research. With approximately 120,000 annual visitors and a strong public program, it has established itself as a dynamic institution with an international outlook.

CURATOR

MANUELA MOSCOSO is the inaugural Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and, in 2025, curated the 2a Bienal das Amazônias. Formerly curator of the Liverpool Biennial (2021) and a senior curator at Museo Tamayo, Moscoso focuses her work on relational, political, and embodied approaches to contemporary art and institutions.

EXHIBITORS

OSCAR SANTILLÁN is an Ecuadorian artist working between Ecuador and the Netherlands. His practice explores science, ancestral technologies, and the concept of the “Anti-world,” dissolving boundaries between the natural and artificial. His work has been shown internationally and he is active in art education.

TAWNA is an anti-colonial collective of Sápara, Kichwa, and mestizo artists founded in 2017. Working with video, photography, and living archives, they create narratives from Amazonian territories through ritual, dreaming, and community-based processes. Their work has been shown internationally.

INSTITUTIONAL LEADERSHIP Romina Muñoz Procel (Vice Minister of Culture of the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture, Ecuador), Stephanie García Albán (Executive Director MAAC)

RODUCTION & PR Anna Shvets TAtchers’ Art Management

EXHIBITION DESIGN Studio Manuel Raeder

SUPPORTERS Vice Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture, Vice Ministry of Tourism, Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in Italy, Foundation Identidad Nacional, NIRSA, James Fuentes Gallery, Foundation EACHEVE, Livia Benavides Gallery, Global Transport, TAtchers’ Art Management, Colecciona.Art, Pily Estrada Lecaro, Dos Islas Studios, Giada Lusardi

PAVILION OF ECUADOR – ADDRESS: Castello 1636/A, Venice, Italy

OPENING: Wednesday 6 May, 4 PM, RSVP by 4 May to tatchersartmanagement@gmail.com

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC May 9 – November 22, 2026, daily except Monday, free entry. May: 11 – 6 PM, June:

11 – 5 PM, July-November: 11 – 4 PM

MEDIA CONTACT: tatchersartmanagement@gmail.com WhatsApp: +7 903 2252210, Tg/ Mob: +593 96 773 0929

MORE INFO: https://pavilionofecuador.art, https://www.instagram.com/maacec

#EcuadorPavilion #PavilionOfEcuador #TAWNA #OscarSantillan #MAAC #ContemporaryArt #BiennaleArte2026 #InMinorKeys

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The Story

12th March – 23rd May 2026

Founded twenty-eight years ago, HackelBury traces its origins to the lifelong passion for art shared by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel, collectors for more than thirty-six years. This exhibition brings together the works which first ignited their interest in photography and helped shape their collecting philosophy long before the gallery opened. It also celebrates the artists whose practices have defined HackelBury’s identity across the decades.

From modernist masters such as Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White and Consuelo Kanaga, to artists who have exhibited at the gallery including Ellen Auerbach, Berenice Abbott and Arnold Newman and to influential contemporary voices such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Joanne Leonard, Doug & Mike Starn, Bill Armstrong and others, the exhibition honours the individuals who have shaped HackelBury’s past and continue to inspire its future.

The works on view — ranging from Irving Penn’s Cigarette No. 111, William Klein’s exuberant painted contacts, Joanne Leonard’s domestic interiors to Margaret Bourke-White historic image of the United Statses Airship ‘Akron’, celebrate the personal and artistic relationships at the heart of the gallery’s story. They also illuminate Sascha and Marcus’s enduring commitment to championing artists who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

Curated as a “memoir” with selections made by founders Sascha Hackel and Marcus Bury alongside contributions from the HackelBury team, the exhibition offers a shared reflection on the images and artists which resonate at HackelBury. It is a celebration of works, a tribute to the relationships which have shaped HackelBury, and an homage to the artists who continue to define the gallery’s vision.

About HackelBury Fine Art

HackelBury was founded twenty-eight years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier- Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Malick Sidibe, and Sebastião Salgado. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as William Klein, Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong.

In recent years the gallery has taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova, Alys Tomlinson, Coral Woodbury and Sharon Walters.

Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long term.

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The HackelBury Story     

Sascha Hackel, co-founder of HackelBury Fine Art, entered the art world not through formal training but through an early love of black-and-white cinema. After moving to London in her twenties, a chance encounter at Hamiltons Gallery gave her an unexpected start in the photography world — a trial week which turned into seven years working with major photographers and learning the market from the inside at a time when photography was scarcely recognised as fine art in the UK.

She and her husband, Marcus Bury, became passionate collectors in the 1990s — the days when an Irving Penn print could still be bought for £1,500 and when viewing 600-lot auctions at Sotheby’s or Christie’s was an education in itself. Their shared instinct for discovering photographers under-recognised in London became the seed of a future gallery.

In 1998, with a one-year-old at home, the couple transformed a dilapidated local frame shop, on Launceston Place, into HackelBury Fine Art. They opened not with glamorous fashion photography but with Roman Vishniac — a statement of seriousness, integrity and historical depth. From the start, they built their programme around artists who had not been properly exhibited in London, developing long-standing relationships defined by trust, loyalty and a deep belief in each artist’s work.

Although rooted in photography, HackelBury has always followed its artists as their practices evolve, supporting shifts across disciplines as naturally as they unfold. Over the years, the gallery has championed photographers moving into new mediums — from drawing to filmmaking — and has worked closely with multidisciplinary voices such as Doug and Mike Starn and Ian McKeever, whose practice bridges photography and painting, and Coral Woodbury, whose work spans image, object and text. This commitment to accompanying artists on their creative journeys has become as central to the gallery’s identity as its dedication to photographic practice itself.

Over 25+ years, HackelBury became known for championing humanist, street and conceptual photography, introducing London to figures such as Pascal Kern, Martine Franck, Malick Sidibe, and later forging decades-long collaborations with artists including Doug and Mike Starn, William Klein and Marc Riboud. Unlike many galleries, they still operate without contracts —relationships sustained by trust, shared values and a commitment to supporting artists through everything from health crises to book publishing.

Through constant shifts in the art world, from the 2008 crash to COVID to a transformed media landscape, the gallery has persisted by staying true to a core ethos: only show artists whose work they would collect themselves; invest deeply and emotionally in every relationship; price work ethically; and prioritise long-term development.

In recent years, a new generation of women artists has entered the programme, reflecting a conscious shift toward nurturing female voices and emerging talents who resonate emotionally and conceptually with the gallery’s history.

The Story exhibition brings all of this together — not a retrospective of artists, but a meditation on 29 years of relationships, instincts, risks and quiet revolutions within the photography world.

Paintings by Sabrina Shah on surfaces by Shane Bradford

Trespass is an unusual collaboration between Union curator Shane Bradford and painter Sabrina Shah. The project is intended to test the jurisdiction of creative authorship in a traditional gallery setting. While these works are firmly Shah’s painting, the fact that they have been painted on top of abandoned former works by Bradford defines the series. Doubts arise. Questions are posed: what does it mean to trespass? Where is the consent?

To all these queries there is only one reliable response: the exhibition itself. A complex curatorial conundrum has been initiated, the outcome of which is visible in the actual event of the exhibition experience. If there are answers, they reside within the dynamism of Shah’s brushstrokes and the inherent surprise of the unpremeditated symbiosis between the protagonists.

Shah’s spontaneous, unfiltered, and immediate paint-handling is supported by the show’s context, allowing for the event to remain in progress. The imagery often depicts participatory social happenings to which the viewer is invited. The result is a gloriously jarring and unexpected extension of Shah’s painterly psycho-dramatic fiction.

Shah has a history of reworking her older paintings. The previous layers and scars are important. This time, however, her imagery responds to the incomplete narrative threads of Bradford’s beginnings’. Suggestive traces of basketball courts, road traffic barriers, and abandoned train tracks are picked-up on and answered with animals, characters, toys, and games. 1,2,3. First, second, and third. Is anybody winning?

While Bradford’s backgrounds perform the dual role of story and substrate to provide an authentic foundation for Shah’s primary interventions, an intimate yet delightfully unstable bond is formed. Despite the literal cover-up there is no hiding; the uncertain friction between object and ground makes for an atmosphere of palpable vitality. There’s a raw honesty in the dynamic fusion of the paintings that perfectly platforms Shah’s naturally expressive and distinctive idiosyncrasies.

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Publishing in Art Style Magazine is free of charge for anyone. There are no article processing charges or other publication fees. Art Style Magazine is independent and supports the Open Access Movement. The editors of Art Style Magazine cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in essays and articles published on the Art Style Magazine’s website and editions. Authors agree to the terms and conditions and assure that their submissions are free of third parties’ rights. The views and opinions expressed in the essays and articles are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Art Style Magazine. The authors of Art Style Magazine’s essays and articles are responsible for its content. The Art Style Magazine‘s website provides links to third-party websites. However, the magazine is not responsible for the contents of those linked sites, nor for any link contained in the linked site content of external Internet sites (see Terms & Conditions).