We draw back the curtains on our building’s Berlin apartment; outside lies Kreuzberg’s gray sky, inside a vast echo chamber born from a single image. This week, no:26 turns its gaze toward Lindenstrasse, to Soy Capitán gallery, where the pulse of contemporary art beats strongest. Opening on the evening of February 13, 2026, Shahin Afrassiabi’s exhibition “FRANCIS – Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2023–2025” invites us not merely to a portrait gallery, but to an experimental playground where painting tests its own limits. Born in Tehran, schooled in London’s Goldsmiths tradition, and now shuttling between Granada and London, Afrassiabi has devoted the past two years to an almost obsessive fidelity to a single photograph taken inside Francis Bacon’s studio. So why would an artist imprison himself for so long in one frame? Or is it not imprisonment at all, but an endless attempt at liberation? In this piece we descend into the depths of this “weedy” narrative—nourished by Berlin’s underground energy and wandering along the borders of tragedy and the absurd.
A Whole Universe Born from a Single Photograph
Shahin Afrassiabi’s exhibition does not so much depict Francis Bacon as use him as a method. More than seventy paintings, drawings, and sculptures spread across the gallery’s white walls all sprout from that famous single shot of Bacon’s studio. Yet what confronts us is not a conventional portrait series; rather, an endless series of variations on a single theme.
Afrassiabi dissects the image, twists it, and rebuilds it. For the artist, Bacon is less a subject than a tool with which painting pushes against its own boundaries. In the air of this floor, it is impossible not to feel the hypnotic effect produced by repetition. Each brushstroke arrives like a new question interrogating the answer that came before.
A Narrative Without Hierarchy: Is Francis a Subject or a Device?
The exhibition layout rejects the conventional logic of a “central piece.” The works are arranged without hierarchical order, almost like a dense star cluster.
- Fragmented Faces: Portraits that pay homage to Bacon’s characteristic deformations.
- Earthscapes: Muddy, textured surfaces where figure and space bleed into one another.
- Humor and Tragedy: As you move between works, an absurd smile sometimes accompanies you, at other times a deep melancholy.
Afrassiabi adopts a practice built on repetition without resolution. Instead of offering the viewer a finished story, he grants the privilege of witnessing an ongoing laboratory process.
An Artistic Laboratory in the Heart of Kreuzberg
Berlin’s art scene has always chased the unfinished and the transformative. This exhibition at Soy Capitán reflects precisely that spirit. Afrassiabi’s decision to treat painting as a testing ground rather than a field of depiction aligns perfectly with Berlin’s famous “fearless experimentation” attitude.
Exhibition Details
Artist: Shahin Afrassiabi
Title: FRANCIS – Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2023–2025
Venue: Soy Capitán, Lindenstrasse 34, 10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg
Dates: February 13 – March 28, 2026
Note to Apartment Residents: If you are curious about how a single image can be shattered into a thousand pieces, each fragment yielding a new meaning, this exhibition will be one of the unmissable events of the coming spring months.
