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until 14.11. | #5178ARTatBerlin | WENTRUP shows from Friday, 16. October 2026 the exhibition “Mondrian Ambiente” by the artist Olaf Metzel.
In his fifth solo exhibition at Wentrup, Olaf Metzel explores modern architecture and design. ‘Mondrian Ambiente’ is a formal exploration – or rather a formal unmasking – of objects and ideas. In doing so, Metzel subjects the supposed clarity of modernist form and order to the forces that have always characterised his work: irregularity, fragmentation and ambiguity.
Among the figures referenced in “Mondrian Ambiente” are, alongside the eponymous Piet Mondrian, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, Oscar Niemeyer and Carlo Scarpa: artists, architects and designers whose radically different working methods are nevertheless linked by an intense interest in the relationships between elements, line and plane, form and object, material and space, and detail and the whole.
Olaf Metzel, Hansaplatz, 2026. Aluminum, stainless steel, digital print, 145 x 130 x 28 cm. Photo: Leonie Felle
Groups such as the Dutch ‘De Stijl’ and its members Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian and the architect Gerrit Rietveld played a decisive role in establishing the language of purity and restraint. Yet conflicts with Modernism are deeply inherent in Modernism itself. It was Doesburg who proclaimed that the new modern architecture must arise from the relationships between opposites – shortly before he ended his collaboration with Mondrian in order to finally have the freedom to draw diagonal lines.
The wider milieu of that era moved freely between designing lounge chairs, writing manifestos, painting abstract pictures and building functional houses. In Metzel’s work, these forms collide. Architecture and design, books and reviews – not only as physical structures but also as social instruments – become theatres of conflict. Yet if, as Le Corbusier claimed, a house is a machine for living in, what, then, is art a machine for?
Portrait of Olaf Metzel. Photo courtesy the artist
The suspended nature of these objects, in a sense, reverses the way in which modernism reduced forms to their fundamental elements: the reduction becomes a very real one. From an object one lives in to an object one lives with – this transformation takes place on more levels than just size and practicality. The architect becomes his creation; the mid-century chaise longue becomes a sculpture; the architectural detail becomes a fragment; the functional object becomes an image; the image becomes an obstacle.
Working across disciplines, Metzel renders his material unreadable, yet tangible. In his sculptures, he turns his motifs against themselves, twisting, distorting and crushing them, thereby warping the clear, symmetrical structures they purport to represent, breaking their straight lines and stripping them of their familiarity and beauty to the point of irritation. Yet, as Loos, another forefather of modernism, once mused: architecture should please everyone; art, on the other hand, should please no one.
Vernissage: Friday, 16. October 2026, 6:00pm–8:00pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 16. October to Saturday, 14. November 2026
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Title image caption: Olaf Metzel, engagée (Charlotte Perriand), 2026. Aluminum, stainless steel, digital print, 107 x 108 x 15 cm. Photo: Leonie Felle
Exhibition Olaf Metzel – WENTRUP | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitiond Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
