Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin – Potsdamer Straße 77–87
🗓️ On view through October 25, 2025
Galerie Max Hetzler brings together two artists from different generations in a shared space: Hans Josephsohn’s textured sculptures and Günther Förg’s grid paintings from the 1990s converge in A Dialogue.
This encounter is a conversation between form and material, weight and surface, silence and vibration.
Josephsohn’s sculptures define the human body not through form but through mass. His use of quick-drying plaster since the 1950s creates surfaces marked with fingerprints—capturing not a body but its state of being. Though some sculptures bear names like Lola or Madeleine, these are mere suggestions. The true portrait lies in the surface’s ambiguity, in the weight of an existence shaped by time.
Förg, in the same period, engages the painted surface with volume. His “grid” paintings—layers of blue, green, and black lines—suggest a quest for architectural order. Up close, the paint texture is thick, almost three-dimensional; from afar, it resembles woven fabric. These grids stand at the final boundary before abandoning figuration, existing as both painting and structure, sound and silence.
On the gallery’s lower level, Josephsohn’s bronze sculptures and Förg’s paintings establish a “balance of weight.” Upstairs, reliefs by both artists—one in concrete, the other in bronze—forge a shared language of surface and light. The works of both allow material to speak for itself: in Josephsohn’s sculptures, a breath hidden within weight; in Förg’s paintings, a rhythm seeping through the gaps of lines.
A Dialogue creates a space for “tactile thinking” between sculpture and painting. Josephsohn’s sense of volume, which he described as the “counterweight of the body,” finds an invisible equilibrium with Förg’s grids. What unites their work is the primacy of existence over form.
Apartment No: 26 Note
Two artists who never crossed paths engage in a silent dialogue through surface here; as the sculpture breathes, the painting responds.
