We share our plates with them, bring them into our beds, revere them, and slaughter them. This ancient, contradictory, and chronically unresolved encounter between human and animal is brought back into sharp relief in What Looks Back When We Look at Animals (11 September – 14 November 2026), an expansive group exhibition spanning carlier | gebauer’s galleries in Berlin and Madrid.
Bringing together works by thirteen artists, the exhibition refuses to treat the animal simply as a specimen of zoological inquiry or a mythological trope. Instead, it positions the non-human other as an evolutionary and genetic accomplice, balanced on the knife-edge between affection and revulsion, pity and dread. Its most radical provocation, however, concerns the terms of artistic production: what if the animal is not merely a depicted motif, but an active co-author whose intelligence and gestures dictate form?
Translucent Shells, Foam Bodies, and Dreamlike Forests
Aki Inomata tests precisely this question of agency in her series Why Not Hand Over a “Shelter” to Hermit Crabs?. Offering 3D-printed, architecturally intricate shelters of clear resin to hermit crabs, Inomata surrenders anthropocentric design to the will of nature. Lin May Saeed, whose practice was long anchored in animal liberation and radical empathy, summons a fragile yet piercing intimacy in Girl with Cat (2019), carved from modest materials such as Styrofoam, jute, and acrylic.
The bronze texture and grotesque physicality of Thomas Schütte’s Praying Dog (2022) intersect with Asta Gröting’s instinctual explorations, while Pakui Hardware tests the limits of the organic body through biotechnology and synthetic tissues. On canvas, Diego Delas, Sequoia Scavullo, and Paolo Salvador construct fabular, uncanny visual realms where human and animal forms bleed into one another. Elsewhere, the hybrid figures of Paloma Varga Weisz and Julia Kowalska summon ancient myths of metamorphic transfiguration.
Steering clear of didacticism or moral posturing, the exhibition resists easy answers in favor of an encounter thick with contradiction. What ultimately comes into focus is not merely the freight of meaning we project onto the animal, but the dark, strangely familiar reflection staring straight back at us.
