Auto-Paragone | Group exhibition | Galerie Guido W. Baudach | 02.05.-13.06.2026

Galerie Guido W. Baudach is pleased to present a thematic group exhibition featuring five artists from the gallery’s roster at this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin. Under the title Auto-Paragone, Tamina Amadyar, Thomas Helbig, Andy Hope 1930, Hinako Miyabayashi, and Markus Selg each showcase one painterly and one sculptural work in correlation.

The term Paragone, as it appears in the exhibition title, comes from Italian and refers to the so-called competition of the arts, the struggle between painting and sculpture for supposed primacy among the disciplines, which was carried out with verve primarily during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Today, now that the former issue of conviction has long since disappeared from the agenda of art discourse, it is remarkable to observe that the majority of trained painters at some point in the course of their artistic development also become involved in sculpture and, as a result, usually work in both media in parallel, which were once so fiercely competitive — something that, incidentally, rarely occurs in reverse among sculptors. The exhibition Auto-Paragone examines the phenomenon described above by juxtaposing selected works by artists represented by the gallery who have a correspondingly multidisciplinary practice.

In her canvas works – which continue the tradition of colour-field painting and are as minimalist as they are expansive – Tamina Amadyar (born 1989 in Kabul) addresses personal experiences and encounters, particularly those of and with landscape. Her sculptures, on the other hand, which often take the form of installations, have a more domestic feel and, by exploring the theme of interiors, bring its social dimensions into play. In Auto-Paragone, Amadyar presents the large-format painting hydra from 2025, which, in its flowing, partly overlapping shades of blue and green, evokes the vastness and openness of a shallow coast, whilst the bright red floor sculpture balescht, also from that year, brings to mind a neatly piled stack of comfy cushions.

Thomas Helbig (b. 1967 in Rosenheim) is an artist whose work lies at the intersection of folk art and the avant-garde, with references to the Rococo, Baroque, and Romanticism. In addition to paintings and drawings featuring often enigmatic, ambiguous motifs, Helbig also creates assemblage-like sculptures that oscillate even more strongly than his pictorial works between figuration and abstraction and appear like totems of an unknown cult. Helbig’s contribution to Auto-Paragone consists of the painting Same, 2026 – which, on the one hand, appears to depict an ethereal landscape, yet on the other hand also features various cryptic symbols and other visual elements that are difficult to decipher – as well as the pedestal sculpture Austrian, also from 2026, which, using fragments of kitsch figures and pieces of furniture, presents a symbolism-laden metamorphosis of a cherub and a snake.

In the diverse practice of Andy Hope 1930 (b. 1963 in Munich) – which ranges from drawing and collage to painting and sculpture, and on to installation and video – influences from the classical avant-garde, science fiction, and popular culture have merged into a distinctive visual language. It marks a body of work that is in a state of constant development, evolving and changing without, however, losing any of its characteristic conciseness. This is also evident in the two works exhibited here, which are in fact already historical: the sculpture Mok from 2001, which brings to mind an oversized toy tree, but could also be a prop from a dystopian film, as well as the painting Inferia from the following year, a nightmarish mountain landscape featuring rocket-like church steeples and Hope’s almost iconographic black eagle vulture at its center.

Hinako Miyabayashi (b. 1997 in Hokkaido) blends Japanese and Western painting traditions in her practice. Her works, which appear purely abstract, are characterized by a deeply felt, almost animistic connection to nature. In doing so, Miyabayashi consistently combines ventional materials with innovative, unconventional ones. Recently, she has begun to express her approach through sculptural works as well. In Auto-Paragone Miyabayashi presents the painting A Star Hole Turning, 2026, executed with earth-bound materials such as charcoal and sand on construction site safety netting and cotton, as well as the stone sculpture Next to Back, 2025, whose two roughly equal parts are reminiscent of archaeological artifacts – fragments of a once-whole – which the artist seeks to be playfully re-contextualized in ever-changing ways.

Markus Selg (b. 1974 in Singen) works across various media and disciplines to artistically reconcile nature and technology, the physical and digital worlds. As a pioneer and leading figure in art created with and on the computer – particularly in the form of painting – Selg has recently been using digital tools and state-of-the-art printing techniques increasingly within his sculptural practice as well, for example in the exhibited work Thistle Relic on a Mandelbrot Plain, 2026, in which computer-generated fractal forms reveal their kinship to the structure of a dried thistle flower. The computer painting Paradoxides I, 2022, in turn, depicts fossilized tribolites, one of the earliest complex life forms in evolutionary history. It is executed as a UV print on polyester, which Selg subsequently deformed by hand, thereby simultaneously making the picture a relief.