The exhibition brings together works by Maximilian Arnold, Immanuel Birkert, Leon Eisermann, and Sóley Ragnarsdóttir — four distinct practices linked by their engagement with material memory and transformation. Across painting, sculpture, and assemblage, each artist explores how surface becomes a site of remembrance, where images, gestures, and fragments are absorbed, reshaped, and reanimated.
Maximilian Arnold's work begins in a personal archive of newspaper clippings, digital debris, and discarded photographs that linger in the forgotten corners of his smartphone. Collage becomes his primary tool: by printing these materials on stone paper with an almost obsolete inkjet printer, then cutting and reassembling them, he dislocates the images from their origins until figuration and familiarity blur into abstraction. When these collages transition onto canvas, layers of paint begin to obscure and transform the foundations of the initial fragments. Through this process of applying, sanding, and reworking, each painting develops a history of its own making — a process of both erosion and generation. In an age of flattened and accelerated images, Arnold is drawn to the resistance of the worn-out, the misaligned, the degraded. His work explores how meaning shifts as images move across mediums, archives becoming collages, collages becoming paintings — forming a meditation on perception, memory, and the transformation of images over time.
Born in 1987 in Heidelberg, Maximilian Arnold lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe (class of Toon Verhoef) and the Städelschule Frankfurt (class of Willem de Rooij). Recent solo exhibitions include Freed From Desire, Matta, Milan (2025); Days Like This, Gratin, New York (2024); and Splinters, Matta, Rome (2022).
Immanuel Birkert explores how art can be integrated into everyday life. The forms he develops — particularly through his ceramic sculptures — are deeply rooted in art history, echoing shapes that artists have revisited and reinterpreted for generations. His practice moves between naturalism and abstraction, especially in his exploration of the human body, which he approaches not as an anatomical study but as a formal and emotional medium. Birkert’s work reflects a deep affection for Romanticism, understood not as nostalgic idealism but as a living attitude towards the world, shaped by sensitivity, wonder, and emotional engagement with nature, art, and daily experience. His approach is not based on a longing for the past, but in tracing and reinterpreting Romantic modes of perception in a contemporary context.
Born in 1989 in Frankfurt am Main, where he also lives and works, Birkert studied at the Städelschule Frankfurt (class of Tobias Rehberger) and The Cooper Union in New York (class of Pam Lins). Recent solo exhibitions include Acedia, Galerie Tobias Naehring (2025); Maps of my Ceiling 2, Las Palmas, Berlin (2024); and Shady Garden, Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig (2023).
Leon Eisermann's recent paintings continue his engagement with the skeleton as a recurring symbol that navigates the space between life, death, and absurdity. In Bothered by the past, burdened by the future, he constructs a crooked version of the memento mori tradition, condensing the overused pop-cultural signifier of the skull into a contemporary reflection on mortality. The skeleton appears fragmented, distorted, and stretched — both a structural anchor and a formal scaffolding for painterly transformation. Through a multilayered process involving drawing, projection, and the physical layering and removal of paint, Eisermann builds compositions that oscillate between figuration and abstraction, humor and horror. His approach filters historical painting lineages through the lens of “bad painting” — an intentionally unstable, raw language that collapses vanitas, punk, and spiritual yearning into a restless, urban expression of the present.
Born in 1987, Leon Eisermann lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin under Prof. Thomas Zipp and at the Städelschule Frankfurt under Prof. Judith Hopf. Recent solo exhibitions include WHEN WE HAVE EACH OTHER WE HAVE EVERYTHING, Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig (2025); Bothered by the past, burdened by the future, Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2025); and (In)definitely, Goeben, Berlin (2020).
Sóley Ragnarsdóttir's practice unfolds through acts of collecting: shells, stones, amber, plastics, and napkins — fragments of the everyday that carry memory and meaning. What began with an inherited napkin collection from her grandmother has evolved into a broader investigation of material transformation and domestic ritual. Living near the coast of Thy, she gathers natural and man-made debris washed ashore — amber bearing traces of prehistoric forests and plastics that speak of industrial excess and fleeting use. These elements merge within her works as layered compositions of found materials sealed in epoxy, an industrial medium that both preserves and contrasts their fragility. Ragnarsdóttir’s process bridges painting, assemblage, and ornamentation, merging care and craft with painterly experimentation.
Born in 1991 in Iceland, Sóley Ragnarsdóttir lives and works in Thy, Denmark. She also studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main under Professors Amy Sillman, Monika Baer, and Nikolas Gambaroff, and later at the Overgaden INTRO postgraduate program in Copenhagen (2021). Solo presentations include Queen of Hearts, Augustiana Kunsthal and Kunstpark, Denmark (2024), Sign of Care, series of public sculptures, Berceto, Italy (2024) Queen of Hearts, Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum, Kópavogur, Iceland (2024) and Cherrystone, Formation Gallery, Copenhagen (2022).
