Arcane Dust
November 15 – January 4, 2025
Carvalho Park, Brooklyn, NY
We might think we know the colour of dust. Wisps of grey at the edges of rooms, a dull powder that coats unloved surfaces, it is a trace of our bodies (our skin cells, hair, bacteria) as they rub against the world (pollen, mites, soil). Household dust has no use and no beauty: it must be prevented against, swept away. Dust also appears memorably in Genesis as a reminder of the transience of mortal flesh: you are dust, and to dust you shall return. No wonder we are so phobic about its presence in our homes…
Poetics of Nature (Group)
February 28 – May 3, 2025
Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich
We are pleased to announce the group exhibition “Poetics of Nature”. This themed exhibition focuses on various work cycles by Stephan Balkenhol, Leiko Ikemura, Maximilian Rödel, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Thu-Van Tran. Through diverse media and art historical traditions, the selected works converge in their sensory approach to nature. They illuminate nature’s transformative potential to reflect its inherent cyclicality as fundamental principle in our experienced world, re- and deconstructing nature’s character facets as an archetypal place of longing and refuge. Yet in an efficiency- and speed-driven, technoid society, nature is also increasingly exposed to interference and processes of change through the Anthropocene and the view of nature as an exploitable resource; a complex ambivalence that is also subtly made visible in the exhibition.
Foto: Dirk Tacke, Courtesy Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle
Veils of Perception
October 12 – November 16, 2024
pied-à-terre, Berlin
“How does something new come about, and how does it affect what already exists?”
This question could stand alone as an introduction to ‘Veils of Perception’, Maximilian Rödel’s (b. 1984 in Braunschweig) first exhibition at pied-à-terre. The show will feature seven new paintings that challenge traditional notions of perception, inviting viewers to delve beneath the surface and explore the hidden layers of reality within Rödel’s enigmatic works.
CEREMONIES IN LIGHT
February 3 – March 2, 2024
Carvalho Park, Brooklyn, NY
with JULIEN SAUDUBRAY
For the French philosopher Simone Weil, attention is prayer. Part of what prayer achieves, for Weil, is to reveal the absence of the object at the same time as it conveys its presence. Such thinking feels pertinent to the luminous, weightless zones of color in works by Maximilian Rödel and Julien Saudubray. Their intense, diaphanous grounds harness the complexity of what it is to look at a painting, which can be to feel moved and acted upon by it, to enter a proposed state of being. Weil imagines attention as a suspension of thought: it waits, not seeking anything. Through Rödel and Saudubray’s paintings, it is possible to experience this condition, and to see the epiphanies which might come out of its attainment.
Radiations. Various Others
September 2 – Oktober 28, 2023
Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich
“I attempt to solve pictures for me, what emerges in the end, I never know. If I recognize something in the picture while painting that triggers a memory in me that I wasn’t aware of before, it’s finished. This exposed point reverses the painting into something objectively perceptible. My goal is to depict this inspiration as accurately as possible. I do not care what exactly is triggered, what matters is that a connection is created with the viewer.”
The Inner Light and the Expression of Color
September 14 – October 28, 2023
Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong
curated by Philipp Bollmann with Miriam Cahn, Helen Frankenthaler, Leiko Ikemura, Martha Jungwirth and Michael Müller
The Inner Light and the Expression of Color, Text by Philipp Bollmann
PHANTOM SKIES
March 26 – April 30, 2022
Carvalho Park, Brooklyn, NY
A luminous, resonant hymn moves through the space. The chromatic shifts of Rödel’s immense and impalpable paintings open an extraordinary window into unbounded space, transcending physicality with resonances poetic and mythic. Subsuming, pulsing color plays out like live theatre; the players, standing like sentries, enveloping viewers into their world. Amongst an assembly of towering works, two paintings measuring a mere 50 x 40 cm even act as enigmatic portals…
Story Of The Forgotten Lights
Kunstverein Arnsberg, Arnsberg
25 Februar – 10. April 2022
Celestial Artefacts
Neuer Aachener Kunstverein
25. April – 20. Juni 2021
Wassily Kandinsky believed that every artist is impelled by an inner necessity to express three things: His own personality, the spirit of his age, and – as a “servant of art”– art as such. If one shares this view, every single artwork is faced with a major task. The individual work of art must not only address the most intimate aspects of the artist, but also the spirit of the age and the great questions of art. Indeed, we usually judge artworks not only in terms of their capacity to convey an original artistic style, but at the same time ask: What element of innovation do they add to the world that allows us to see it in a new light? How do they push the boundaries of art? …
It Started with a Spark
April 13 – May 23, 2019
Carvalho Park, Brooklyn, NY
with GRACE VILLAMIL
It Started with a Spark speaks of a moment unseen, like that which set off the cosmos. The atmosphere of the gallery becomes an otherworldly one, as Berlin-based artist Maximilian Rödel’s expansive and impalpable paintings – like colossal fragments of the stratosphere – are brought earthbound and held here, setting both tone and scene for a site-specific mylar installation by New York artist Grace Villamil. Of a sensitive and singular vision, Villamil’s radiant terrain attenuates rational thought – obscuring the known and unknown – while inviting viewers to places far and transient. It Started with a Spark, the second exhibition of CARVALHO PARK, opens the evening of April 12, and is on view from April 13 to May 23.
FORTUNATOR
May 25 – June 28, 2019
fiebach, minninger Cologne
Maximilian Rödels solo exhibition bears the title FORTUNATOR and is accompanied by a watercolor paperwork. The artists watercolor shows the cartoon character “Roger” from the American television cartoon “American Dad”. Roger is an eccentric, gender-neutral alien who lives incognito in a stereotyped American family. The alien, dressed as a lady, becomes a figure of the artist with a brush in its hand. The figure
allegorizes the outsider, the incomprehensible, that society harbors. Following this logic, the title FORTUNATOR could refer to the homonymous alter ego of Gladstone Gander from the Donald Duck comics who mostly fights for the good, but always pursues selfish purposes. Historically considered, the mythological reference of the title is “Fortuna”, the Roman goddess of luck and fate; she might stand diametrically opposed to it. The ambivalence inherent in the imaged character as well as the references to high- and pop culture could be considered as metaphorical analogies to contemporary painting. Above here
we should ask ourselves: what do we want from art? Or, to quote Roger at this point: “So on a scale from 0 to Lestat: how do you see me?”
