A Oh yes, the year’s end and the search for these particular blue-green-gray pine branches. Better put, for how it feels to smell them and to fall through time. Right into the memory, which already stands there with open arms to catch you.
During the artist talk I conducted in December with Monika-Maurer Morgenstern at the Mountains Gallery on the occasion of her exhibition “Monika Maurer-Morgenstern: Works from 5 Decades,” the artist allowed us to share moments from her childhood and told them as if they had happened yesterday. How Morgenstern as a child ran outside to avoid disturbing her mother indoors. That her dress was yellow and that she was allowed to get dirty unlike the other children.
Monika-Maurer Morgenstern is the visual mediator of auto-fiction in the visual arts. We experienced her that Advent Sunday as the poet of the scripts, as the director of the imagination. Seldom is anticipation rendered as illuminating and penetrating through drawing as in her amalgams of text and line. The Mountains Gallery presented 40 of the 48 sheets of her series “I Drive to Paris” (1999/2000) in specially made vitrines that ran horizontally along the walls of the gallery. Like a graphic novel, these display surfaces joined the individual drawings into a sequential reading-and-seeing experience that we kept returning to again and again.
How many moments fit into a year? As many as there are names in a telephone directory?
Incredibly delighted this year as well was I when confronted with the works of Kazuki Nakahara. I was able to experience them several times throughout the year. For the first time in autumn at the Positions Berlin Art Fair. In Booth 30, the Gallery Inga Kondeyne presented his refined abstract progressions of colored pencils and pastels on paper: a room of images composed of feather-light curves, waves, and omissions. Nakahara’s works stood beside pieces by Johannes Regin. Regin gathers on his pictures countless dots that he applies or stabs into primed cardboard panels, with subtle color accents at the edges. Two artists, then, who transform traces into living space — a wonderful combination.
Reimagining Line. Drawing 3. Group exhibition with Anke Becker, Myriam El Haïk, Dagmara Genda, Océane Moussé, Kazuki Nakahara, Anna Roberta Vattes, GalerieETAGE at the Museum Reinickendorf, until March 15, 2026, Mon–Fri and Sun 9–17, (on public holidays + Saturdays the museum and GalerieETAGE are closed), Alt-Hermsdorf 35, free admission
Accompanying program for Reimagining Line. Drawing 3 including among others an Artist Talk on 15.1.2026 at 18:30; and an art workshop for children on 3.2.2026, 11–14 h (free of charge, registration: museum(at)reinickendorf.berlin.de)
Liz Dawson and Lucy Teasdale: Madness and Practice. Axel Obiger. Space for Contemporary Art, opening: Friday, January 16, 7 p.m., running 17.1.–7.2.2026, Brunnenstr. 29
Currently at Axel Obiger: Inceptive Spaces, group exhibition of Atelierhaus Hobrecht31, curated by Saeed Foroghi, until January 9, 2026, Thu.–Sat. 15–17 h (closed from 24.12.2025– 4.1.2026), Brunnenstr. 29
At Art Cologne, finally, Rupert Pfab presented the work “o. T. (K-R #01)” by Kazuki Nakahara, which the artist this year allowed to migrate across hand-made paper using colored pencils, graphite and charcoal, measuring a full 180 by 285 cm. Bluish-white and wall-filling, it showed us the way.
How many moments fit into a year? As many as there are names in a telephone directory? In any case, some moments feel as dense and filled as the countless contacts densely printed on the fragile gray paper of the famous directory with the yellow covers. And Dagmara Genda? She has “The Yellow Pages” 2024 cut in such a way that it fans out as a delicate relief against the wall. Presences remain here also in the form of a few translucent names. Yet as with Kazuki Nakahara, in Genda’s works it is the omissions that seem to carry the image space.
Genda’s work is on view as part of the group exhibition “Reimagining Line. Drawing 3” curated by Christy Wahl and Sabine Ziegenrücker at the GalerieETAGE in the Museum Reinickendorf. The exhibition, which runs until mid-March 2026, is also an opportunity to see works by Kazuki Nakahara live.
Just as the lines by Anke Becker, Myriam El Haïk, Océane Moussé and Anna Roberta Vattes come to life here in GalerieETAGE and in turn animate their surroundings, so too is one of the gifts of the year.
In a retrospective, a preview should not be overlooked either. In the spirit of Maurer-Morgenstern’s anticipation, I will indeed look at works by Liz Dawson in January. How she documents her working processes has given me great pleasure this year in the digital realm. On 16 January the double exhibition “Madness and Practice” by Liz Dawson and Lucy Teasdale (16.1., 7 p.m.) will open live and in color at the Axel Obiger Art Space. Liz Dawson’s paintings, based on collaged paper models and remaining palpably spatial, and Lucy Teasdale’s monochrome sculptures, which appear deconstructed yet possess an undeniably essential presence, at the same venue — that will surely be a celebration.
