In his fourth exhibition at Galerie Thomas Fischer, Friedemann Heckel presents a series of watercolors that have been created since 2020. Based on photographs taken with his mobile phone, he painted large-scale still lifes and idiosyncratic portraits. The material itself comes to the foreground: the watercolor runs across the surface and frays, opening to the abstract and contrasting against the untouched white of the paper. And the figures? A captivating light brightens their faces and bodies, the light of a screen, the sun, a lighter. They seem lost in reverie or to be looking vaguely into the distance. What do they see? What do we see? Speculative melancholy and lurking premonitions.

The exhibition is being held at two locations — on Mulackstraße 14 (Thu-Sat, 12–6 pm) and on Potsdamer Straße 98 (Wed-Sat, 12–6 pm).

Dirk Braeckman’s fourth exhibition at Galerie Thomas Fischer explores three typologies: landscape, bodies, and indoor spaces. Using his rich palette of dark, dense monochromes, which have become so synonymous with Braeckman’s photographs, the artist’s matte surfaces offset the play of light and shadow, with each frame enigmatically speaking to the sensuality of memories unspoken. Bringing together new works with older images produced over the past decade, Braeckman delves into his archive of negatives to show both large-scale and medium-format works, all of which leave ghostly imprints that transform the seemingly insignificant minutiae of life into haunting presences.

For this new exhibition at Galerie Thomas Fischer, Laetitia Gendre presents colorful works on paper that deal with the relationship between image and language created by search engines such as Google along with a series of graphite drawings entitled Secret Passages and a mural. The drawings and the mural pay metaphorical homage to the transitive and ungraspable in contrast to the ever-increasing collusion between words and things and to the imperative to define and classify. The title Like a Slug Sticks to the Ground, is a simile used by Belgian philosopher Pascal Chabot to describe how relationship between language and things should not operate.

Îles sans nom is Sebastian Stumpf’s fifth exhibition at Galerie Thomas Fischer. He discovered the islands without a name during a research stay on the Atlantic coast of France. They are rocks offshore that appear or disappear depending on the wind, waves, and tidal flow. Due to their number and small size, they are not marked on nautical maps. In a series of analogue black and white photographs, they present themselves as isolated forms between water and sky, as visual elements without dimension, as bodies of stone. A cartographic rendering of Sebastian Stumpf’s movements between the coastline and the open sea supplements the series.