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until 24.01. | #4855ARTatBerlin | Galerie Judin shows from 15. November 2025 (Vernissage: 14.11.) the exhibition “Error 404“ by the artist Alexander Basil.
Self-reflection, contemplation, searching – these are the terms that first come to mind when attempting to describe Alexander Basil’s latest paintings. With an artist like Basil, whose distinctive visual language is so immediately recognisable, even the subtlest changes in tone or nuance in his visual vocabulary are noticeable. In recent years, the artist has intensively explored his own unique form of self-expression by literally giving his own face to almost all the figures depicted in his works – not only human motifs, but also other living beings and even inanimate objects – resulting in dreamlike, surreal compositions. Now he presents himself with a slightly altered perspective: more analytical, more methodical – but by no means less attentive. Quite the contrary.
His current work covers a specific period beginning with the artist’s birth and continuing to the present day. It is therefore a biographical retrospective in which several developments run parallel – primarily Alexander Basil’s career as an artist and his social and physical transition to manhood.
To this end, Basil repeatedly draws on imagery reminiscent of scientific illustrations of developmental stages. His childhood table, littered with his earliest attempts at drawing, gradually transforms into a fully equipped studio. Always observing from the same bird’s-eye view, the artist – like a researcher striving for the greatest possible objectivity – chooses the bathtub as the setting for documenting changes in his body: growth and maturation, but also scars or changes in his posture.
Basil brings the physical and even intimate aspects of gender-affirming treatment for trans men more clearly into focus than ever before. Images of the medical procedure appear on his laptop, which he repeatedly presents in his paintings—analogous to a canvas or sketchbook—as an indispensable tool for examining and visually appropriating his surroundings. Basil’s research led him to the life story of Laurence Michael Dillon (1915–1962), a Briton who, in the 1940s, was the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty—the surgical construction of a penis. In the corresponding painting, the artist’s face is superimposed on Dillon’s portrait from Wikipedia—just as it clings to a broken key or the lion on the Strength tarot card in other paintings. By lending his face to objects and figures that have a personal connection to him, Basil conveys a sense of total penetration—of everything that occupies his mind. These small faces, addressing the viewer, seem like an invitation to look more closely, to decipher them for oneself. And yet, they also literally look back at the viewer, as if the objects themselves were about to speak: “Because there is no place here where you are not seen. You must change your life.”
In the case of a doctor sitting in his office, making marks on the forearm of one of Basil’s alter egos, no resemblance to the artist can be established, as he has his back to the viewer. And although we don’t hear what the figures say, the mere fact that they are conversing marks a break in the otherwise largely monologic nature of Basil’s paintings—the painter has left his studio and become the canvas himself. At the heart of Basil’s work is the body as an evolving, dreaming, and feeling being. His works demonstrate with striking clarity that the essence of a body is not solely and automatically determined by its outwardly visible, physical characteristics. In his works, there is a continuum between the physical and the environment, between memory and imagination. Alexander Basil masterfully reflects this continuum and, through his canvases, shares the coordinates of his own development—both personal and artistic.
Vernissage: Friday,14. November 2025, 6 to 8 pm.
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 15. November – Saturday, 24. January 2026
To the Galerie
Image caption title: Alexander Basil, Untitled, 2025, Oil on canvas, 140 × 120 cm. Courtesy Galerie Judin, Berlin. Photo: Trevor Good.
Exhibition Alexander Basil – Galerie Judin | Contemporary Art in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
