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until 10.07. |#5076ARTatBerlin | Q Gallery shows from 13. June 2026 (Opening: 12.06) the Solo-exhibition “GROSSE ESSER” by the artist Alexander Dik.
In this series, the painter engages radically with the existential foundations of the human condition: hunger, desire, destruction and self-preservation. The idea of creating larger-than-life portraits of ‘eaters’ was not merely a formal but also a substantive act of liberation – an assault on the conventions of portraiture as well as on the traditional rules of painting.
With this series, the artist breaks down the boundaries of the traditional painting process. After numerous experiments with the brush, the results of which he found unsatisfactory, he decided to take a drastic step: he literally placed himself within the picture. Using his feet, his whole body, he works on the canvas rolled out on the floor – an act of physical intervention that oscillates between destruction and creation. Trampling, dragging, kicking, he creates a raw, direct visual language that eludes all control and yet possesses a profound clarity within itself.
“I have to react constantly,” says the artist. “React to what is there, to my surroundings – and above all to myself.” The *Grosse Esser* are therefore not static portraits, but vibrant snapshots of an inner and outer struggle. Man as a being in a state of emergency – torn between consumption and self-destruction, between carnality and transcendence.
The iconographic similarity to art-historical models such as Leonardo da Vinci’s *The Last Supper*, Van Gogh’s *The Potato Eaters* or Georg Baselitz’s *The Orange Eaters* is no coincidence. It serves as a starting point, as a resonant space in which the *Grosse Esser* reflect on their own era. But whereas those works still operated on a narrative or symbolic level, this painter’s works take the depiction to extremes – towards a direct, brutal present.
“Eat or be eaten,” says the artist – a guiding principle that echoes throughout the canvases. In these works, the act of eating, and the eater, become symbols of humanity itself, caught up in an ongoing process of appropriation, waste and self-destruction.
The Great Eaters are thus not merely paintings – they are bodies, a stage, a battlefield. And at the same time, they represent an uncompromising stance within the contemporary discourse on identity, physicality and pictorial tradition.
Opening: Friday, 12. June 2026, 7 – 10 pm.
Exhibition dates: Samstag, 13. June – Friday, 10. July 2026
Title image caption: Alexander Dik, Delikat N.4, Oil on canvas, courtesy of QGallery Berlin
Exhibition Alexander Dik – Q Gallery Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
