Some experiences leave no concrete documents or clear traces behind, yet they radically alter the connection we establish with the world, our own bodies, and our memory. That hidden ache left inside us by an emotion, trauma, or loss eventually leaks outward as a “symptom.” Opening its doors at its new Charlottenburg venue at Goethestraße 2-3, Galerie Nordenhake hosts a group exhibition titled “Symptoms,” focusing precisely on this conceptual realm. On view between September 11 and October 24, 2026, the selection explores how invisible internal processes can materialize through painting, sculpture, photography, and collage.
Standing at the physical and conceptual center of the exhibition is Benjamin Orlow’s monumental sculpture Ritual City, constructed from plaster, ceramic, and wood. Suspended between formation and dissolution, this fragmented body sculpture enters into dialogue with Edvard Munch’s fluid figures carrying spiritual turmoil onto his canvases. The sense of grief in George Grosz’s early drawing depicting an elderly man collapsed next to an empty dog bowl intersects with John Coplans’ self-portraits presenting aging and vulnerability in colossal dimensions by fragmenting his own body. In the hands of each artist, the body turns into a living space where psychological experiences are recorded.
On the other side, where space and material produce their own symptoms, Mamma Andersson’s uncanny interior scenes fed by childhood memories and archives meet Michael Schmidt’s works photographing the political past embedded in Berlin’s urban fabric. While Sophie Reinhold transforms the material itself into a carrier of memory by embedding marble dust into the canvas surface, Frida Orupabo tears apart and reassembles racist and colonial archival photographs in her collages. Revealing contemporary traces of historical violence, this approach summarizes the common denominator of all the works in the exhibition: Symptoms are not merely representations on their own, but signs emerging simultaneously with the underlying reality hidden deep beneath.
