Something In The Water

Haein Choi, Hanna Kuster, Lucas Kaiser, Paul DD Smith, Andreas Steinbrecher

Info: Something In The Water is a group exhibition co-curated by Andreas Steinbrecher, presenting new voices in contemporary German painting with works by Haein Choi, Lucas Kaiser, Hanna Kuster, Paul DD Smith, and Steinbrecher. The exhibition foregrounds newly developed conditions for pictorial composition: an emphatic return to drawing and an expanded use of images — everyday and iconographic — that opens painting onto renewed narrative possibilities. The exhibition emerges from an ongoing conversation about the state of painting in Düsseldorf — a city whose Kunstakademie remains home to the largest painting class in Germany, yet lacks a clear contemporary framework for the medium. What does it mean to paint today? That question is the common thread running through this show. The five artists gathered here share a renewed commitment to drawing as compositional structure. Against the ahistorical abstraction that dominated painting a decade ago — reintroduce slower, more deliberate processes. The sketch returns as a central tool, bridging drawing and painting in ways that allow for greater coherence between reflection and mark-making. (…)