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until 18.03. | #3771ARTatBerlin | Galerie Martin Mertens presents from 21 January 2023 (Opening: 21.01) the exhibition “Interstellar” by artist Sebastian Herzau.
Galerie Martin Mertens presents a first solo exhibition with the Halle painter Sebastian Herzau, who was awarded the Halle Art Prize in his home town in 2019.
In his extensive painterly work, Herzau largely deals with the classical themes of painting: landscape, portrait, still life. The treatment of these themes, however, is done in a very individual way and is spiced with the artist’s typical humour.
Galerie Martin Mertens, for example, shows a series of flower still lifes that are direct quotations from the French painter Henri Fantin Latour. Herzau takes up these bouquets of flowers from the 19th century, but alienates them by blurring them and depicting them in Ikea vases, which also give the paintings their titles.
Another important group of Herzau’s works are his portraits. In a very naturalistic, almost photo-realistic way, he paints acquaintances and friends or simply people from the internet and then “tapes over” large parts of the people portrayed with various types of adhesive tape. There is masking tape, parcel tape, silver tape or even thick black gaffa tape. On closer inspection, one realises that nothing is as it seems at first glance. The portraits are not photographs and the tape is not real tape but virtuoso oil paint. Herzau is also not interested in the people depicted, but the viewer’s gaze should be drawn to the picture itself. The exhibition and Herzau’s work as a whole celebrate the joy of painting, of inventing pictorial motifs and of playing behind the scenes with the viewer.
Vernissage: Saturday 21 January 2023, 5:00 – 9:00 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 21 January to Saturday, 18 March 2023
To the Gallery
Caption: the great below B. II-19 L., 160 x 140 cm, Acryl auf Leinwand, 2019
Exhibition Sebastian Herzau – Galerie Martin Mertens | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
