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Ausstellung
NOT YET, NOT ANYMORE. Henri Haake, Kallirroi Ioannidou, Angus McCrum, Babette Semmer
DATUM 06. Sep. 2025 - 17. Oct. 2025 Ort DIEHL, Mommsenstrasse 65 ERÖFFNUNG 05. Sep. 2025 19:00

 

"Whether figurative or not, art draws its life from the vivid being of forms,

from the very act of becoming."[1]

 

Through four distinct emerging painterly positions from Berlin, the group exhibition explores how images can hold the in-between — the fleeting, the ambiguous, the transformed — as those elusive states of “not yet” and “not anymore.” Each artist captures a specific approach to the instability of perception, revealing the painterly as a space where absence and presence are in constant negotiation.

For Henri Haake (b. 1989) layering and overpainting are crucial to the artistic practice. Narratives and figures drawn from everyday life are first constructed, only to be subsequently blurred or concealed. What for example, at first seems to take shape as a snapshot from the warm pools of Berlin’s Vabali slips from the view in the very next moment­­—only to lead back into a misty, steaming scenery.

Kallirroi Ioannidou also draws from daily life. Working across diverse media, such as drawing, painting and sculpture, her artworks resist linear narratives or definitive conclusions. Instead, they unfold in an associative rhythm, inviting viewers to navigate between motifs, abstract forms and poetic titles. In a painting such as Having control over, for instance, the object of control never quite reveals itself; it seems to dissolve within one's hands, slipping away—perhaps much like control itself.

Depicting urban and rural scenery as well as still lives, often in small-scale formats, Angus McCrum’s (b. 1987) works frequently let representation dissolve into the very painterly itself. Through dense, impasto application, the paint—in all its radiant colors—in one moment comes to the forefront of the perception; only to yield back in the next moment to an abstracted depiction, as to be seen in a painting such as the Grand Hotel. The rural and urban locations where he sources his materials allow his paintings to stand as quiet witnesses to what was, what is, and what may never be again.

Babette Semmer (b. 1989) engages with the rhythm of absence and presence through shifts of focus. Scenes or fragments that would usually be perceived only peripherally are often brought to the very center of her compositions; thus, the Sugar Shaker becomes the protagonist of a painting of the same name. The source material for the motifs often comes from BRAVO photo stories of the 1990s—a medium that has since lost much of its former popularity the artist revives in the present.

The flux of “not yet” and “not anymore” presented in this group exhibition evolves around this continuous rhythm; the rhythm of absence and presence, emergence and withdrawal, what comes forth and what recedes.

 

The exhibition’s title becomes more than a temporal marker; it is a conceptual framework. It names the condition of contemporary life—a life lived between what has passed and what has not yet arrived. In this sense, the show is both introspective and outward-looking, poetic and precise. It asks us not just to look, but to linger—to stay with what flickers, disappears, or evades understanding.

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[1] Henri Maldiney, The Aesthetics of the Rhythm, in: Blümle, Schäfer (Ed.): Struktur, Figur, Kontur: Abstraktion in Kunst und Lebenswissenschaften, Berlin 2007.