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until 31.01. | #4890AARTatBerlin | Galerie kajetan Berlin shows from Saturday, 13 December 2025 (Opening: 12.12.) the exhibition “Sidetracked” by the artist Marc Nagtzaam.
Galerie kajetan is pleased to present Sidetracked, a solo exhibition by Dutch artist Marc Nagtzaam (*1968). The exhibition brings together recent graphite drawings and new Riso prints in which Nagtzaam expands his characteristic, geometrically inflected visual language through the use of color for the first time.
Since the late 1990s, Nagtzaam has developed a drawing practice sustained by the tension between order and deviation. His works emerge slowly, layer by layer, as successive condensations of surfaces and rhythms. Drawing itself becomes the subject of the work — a process that records time, constructs visual space, and directs attention to the fundamental element of any image: the line.
Marc Nagtzaam, Sidetracked, Exhibition view,
Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
In A Collection of Pages (2025), Nagtzaam creates a system of rectangular fields that seem to follow the logic of a grid, though their continuity is deliberately broken by intentional gaps. The open passages, revealing the support — the paper — and early drawing layers, testify to the linear buildup of the composition and make visible the small deviations that occur within each field. The meticulously applied graphite strokes generate a visual shimmer — a vibrating mesh that seems to hover before the eye. A field of tension unfolds between constructive structure and intuitive marking.
Marc Nagtzaam, Sidetracked, Exhibition view,
Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
The title of the work points to a crucial step within Nagtzaam’s artistic process. He begins with a structural plan that appears to take a detour: the artist selects pages and image fragments from magazines, architectural photographs, layouts, or earlier drawings. These elements are re-arranged and then put together as a collage. Nagtzaam transfers the external and internal scaffolding of the images — their lines, edges, and fields — which are subsequently filled in and defined through drawing. The original images disappear; new ones take their place, referring only to themselves and existing solely as drawing.
Marc Nagtzaam, Sidetracked, Exhibition view,
Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
The Space of Two Weeks (2025) addresses the relationship between time and surface. The individual fields are executed in varying degrees of density from top to bottom: the upper sections consist of multilayered, dark graphite tones, which gradually lighten as the eye moves downward, until they meet what appear to be unfinished or merely prepared areas. The sequence of fields generates subtle push-and-pull effects, lending the surface a spatial presence. At the same time, this progression activates our imagination: what might the work look like after another two weeks? How would tonalities and densities shift? Each field embodies a span of time made materially visible.
In No One is There (2025), the emphasis shifts toward an almost closed surface, yet one that holds an internal movement: narrow, bright passages and subtle tonal shifts rhythmize the vertical field. The title evokes a restless, unsettled configuration — an order maintained through interruption and limitation.
Marc Nagtzaam, Sidetracked, Exhibition view,
Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Nagtzaam’s works operate at a medium scale, allowing the dense graphite textures to unfold a nearly tactile quality at close range, while from a distance clear geometric structures prevail. This applies equally to his new Riso prints Surfaces (Drawings / Colors) (2025). The risograph process, in which each color layer is printed separately through a stencil, offers the artist a method closely aligned with his drawing practice. Minimal register shifts generate delicate blurrings and overlays.
In these prints, a fine, net-like dotted pattern emerges — a printed raster that settles over the composition like an additional layer, marking the sheet unmistakably as a technical artifact. In another print in contrast, purple lines that were originally handwritten and dynamic appear transformed through the printing process: the gestural impulse remains perceptible, yet in reproduction it becomes a structuring, de-personalized mark. Here, color too, is not used expressively, but as another component in an ongoing investigation of density and depth, plane and rhythm.
Marc Nagtzaam, Sidetracked, Exhibition view,
Courtesy the artist & Galerie kajetan, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Although Nagtzaam’s work resonates with tendencies of postmodern abstraction — such as the serial logic of Minimal Art and the geometric clarity of Concrete Art — he redirects their principles in an entirely original way. Where Minimal Art aspired to an industrial, uniform, and cool appearance, and Concrete Art pursued mathematical order, Nagtzaam insists on the visibility of the handmade, with all its subtle irregularities. Grids remain permeable, surfaces carry the weight of their graphite, and systems allow for the unplanned. His treatment of time also distinguishes him from late-20th-century conceptual positions: time does not appear as a calendrical concept, but as a gradually thickened, material graphite layer. Thus, from the simultaneity of regularity and deviation, structure and intuition, emerges a quiet, autonomous body of work — precise, concentrated, and open at once.
Text: Eliza Grabarek
Marc Nagtzaam was born in 1968 in Helmond, the Netherlands. He lives and works in Hoofdplaat, the Netherlands. Over the years, the artist has established himself within the international art scene and realized a wide range of solo and group exhibitions. Notable solo presentations include The Same and the Other (2024, Umbrella West Coast Exhibitions, Nørre Nebel, Denmark), Regular Features (art3, Valance, France), and Not Available (2014, De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, Middelburg, the Netherlands). His work has also been shown in prominent institutions such as S.M.A.K., Ghent; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome.
His works have been featured in numerous duo or group exhibitions, including En Route (with Stephan Keppel, Bradwolff Projects, Amsterdam), Trance-Action (MuZEE, Oostende, Belgium), and Bottom Line (2015, S.M.A.K., Ghent). His works are included in important collections, among them the Centraal Museum, Utrecht; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris.
Since the 1990s, Nagtzaam has published numerous works and texts through Roma Publications, an independent press he co-founded in 1998. The imprint has gained international recognition and holds a respected position in the art world. Its publications are archived in the MoMA Library, New York; the New York Public Library; and in major collections such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and MACBA, Barcelona.
Opening: Friday, 12 December 2025, 6:00–9:00 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 13 December 2025 until Friday, 31 January 2026
To the Gallery
Image caption title: Marc Nagtzaam, Flächen, 2025, Unique Riso print, 42 × 30 cm.
Exhibition Marc Nagtzaam – Galerie kajetan Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst – Contemporary Art – Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
