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until 25.06. | #5052ARTatBerlin | Galerie kajetan Berlin shows from Saturday, 2. May 2026 (Opening: 01.05.) the exhibition Malereien III by the artist Claude Viallat.
Galerie kajetan is pleased to present the third solo exhibition by artist Claude Viallat (born in 1936 in Nîmes, where he lives and works). Viallat is considered one of the most influential innovators in painting, particularly within the context of the French Supports/Surfaces movement, of which he was a co-founder. The exhibition brings together works from 2024 and 2025, in which the radical redefinition of painting for which Viallat has stood since the late 1960s is exemplarily condensed: the separation of the picture surface from the stretcher frame, the turn toward found, used, or discarded industrially manufactured materials, and the consistent use of a serial form—neither clearly organic nor geometric—that has become his trademark.
Claude Viallat | Malereien III | Ausstellungsansicht / Exhibition View 2026 | Courtesy Claude Viallat & Galerie kajetan | Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Viallat’s creative process begins with the material he works with. The artist collects these materials—often donations, discarded everyday textiles, or industrial surplus—and stores them unsorted in his studio. Their respective texture, density, structure, and patterns, as well as physical obstacles such as seams or hems, determine how and with what intensity he applies paint.
Claude Viallat | 488 / 2025 | 2025 | Acryl auf Gewebe / Acrylic on fabric | 134 x 67 cm / 52,8 x 26,4 in, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Viallat applies the paint—always acrylic—to the fabric using a stencil, sponge, or brush—sometimes thickly, sometimes transparently—while responding directly to the fabric’s properties. The recurring form is usually distributed evenly across the entire surface, creating a net-like all-over structure that challenges the classical composition of a painting: perspective, the pictorial center, and internal pictorial hierarchy recede into the background.
In the work 331/2025, the fabric used as the canvas, with its almost trapezoidal shape, also defies the traditional rectangular pictorial order. The fabric strips hanging down at the bottom extend the work into space, thereby subverting the notion of a self-contained, flat pictorial body—the painting becomes an object.
Claude Viallat | 409 / 2025 | 2025 | Acryl auf Gewebe / Acrylic on fabric | 72 x 134 cm / 28,3 x 52,8 in, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Viallat’s serial form appears here in deep black, filled with a subdued beige tone that recurs even beyond the defined shape. The black outline appears translucent, allowing the applied colors to blend in places and be framed by a delicate, opaque pink. Color, form, and support enter into an equal dialogue, underscored by the rich orange of the hem. The fabric used—presumably a former apron—is no longer a pure, as neutral as possible image carrier, but becomes an image-forming element in its own right, with its visible signs of wear as well as its fragmented form—to which Viallat responds pictorially with a fragmented grid of forms.
In 374 / 2024 as well, Viallat declares the painting surface—a beige fabric with a floral pattern—to be an equal participant within the pictorial composition. The form, repeated in blue, is applied with heavily diluted paint that runs at the edges, seeps into the fabric, and appears as splashes of color on the picture plane. Here, the formal element appears less as a clearly defined sign than as a trace sensitively embedded in the material.
Claude Viallat | 349 / 2025 | 2025 | Acryl auf Gewebe / Acrylic on fabric | 185 x 92 cm / 72,8 x 36,2 in, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Viallat deliberately disrupts the serial arrangement through two further interventions: a white-bordered color field pointing sharply downward “cuts” into the composition from the left corner of the picture, while another color field, bordered in bright red, functions as a visual, almost halting counterweight at the lower right edge of the picture. The result is a field of tension created by repetition, materiality, and painterly intervention.
In contrast, the work 349/2025 appears almost monotonous. Yet here a central aspect of the artist’s work is revealed: he uses his grid of forms to deliberately set our perception in motion. The blue fabric of the support remains fully present in its own color and material structure as a painterly void, while a white, glazed layer of paint extensively frames the heavily diluted black contour of the serial form. The relationship between figure (serial form) and ground is constantly shifting. Depending on the viewer’s perspective, either the blue surface of the fabric emerges as the motif, or the white-painted surface—dominated by recesses and deep folds in the painting’s ground—appears as the central, and thus foreground, pictorial element. The interchangeability of figure and ground creates a moment of flux that keeps perception unstable and undermines any unambiguous interpretation.
Claude Viallat | 328 / 2024 | 2024 | Acryl auf Gewebe / Acrylic on fabric | 169 x 116 cm / 66,5 x 45,7 in , Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
The recurring form characteristic of Viallat does not function as a motif in the classical sense. Its effect arises in each instance in relation to the painting surface as an independent, image-forming element, complete with its material history. The repetition does not create uniformity, but rather refers—sometimes in contrast, sometimes in harmony—to the respective nature of the materials. At the same time, the relationship between figure and ground shifts. The established form structures the picture surface, while the latter also pushes itself visually into the foreground, so that foreground and background—and thus also the hierarchy of painting and painting surface—seem to dissolve.
The works allude to the conditions of their own creation and reveal how they are made: through a sensitive and expressive combination of found materials, paint, and painterly intervention that subverts traditional notions of imagery and blurs the boundary between painting and object.
Eliza Grabarek
Opening: Friday, 1. May 2026, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 2. May until Thursday, 25. June 2026
To the gallery
Titel image caption: Claude Viallat | 331/2025 | Acryl auf Gewebe/ Acrylic on fabric | 112 x 78 cm / 44,1 x 30,7 in, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Exhibition Claude Viallat – Galerie kajetan Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst – Contemporary Art – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
