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until 11.04. | #4968ARTatBerlin | Galerie alexander levy currently shows the exhibition Carries by the artists Mariechen Danz, Friedrich Einhoff and Xie Lei.
What becomes visible when a body is represented, shaped, or fragmented? Bodies are not closed units. They are in constant relationship with their environment. They preserve experiences and memories in dreams, gestures, routines, and scars. They function as a threshold between inside and outside, between individual experience and social structure, between past and present.
“Carriers” brings together three artistic positions that examine the body as a repository and projection surface for memory, power, and transformation. Mariechen Danz, Friedrich Einhoff, and Xie Lei analyze, in different ways, how experience is deposited in our bodies.
Mariechen Danz, Friedrich Einhoff, Xie Lei,Carriers, installation view alexander levy, Berlin,
photo: Marcus Schneider, courtesy of the artists, alexander levy, Berlin.
Xie Lei’s painting operates in the liminal space between dream state and consciousness. His figures appear in states of suspension, without clearly definable locations or narrative fixation. They remain anonymous. What matters is not who they are, but their state of being. Xie Lei is interested in intense states of human sensation such as pain and pleasure, and the ambiguity of human relationships. The fall is a recurring motif, becoming a symbol for a psychological sensation oscillating between loss of control, gravity, and transition. This feeling is intensified in the works of the “Premonition” series in the upper room of the exhibition. Individual figures appear upside down in the pictorial space. Their faces are distorted, their mouths open; whether from pain or pleasure remains ambiguous. The works appear like studies, suggested, concentrated, and without narrative elaboration. Through the brushstrokes, the pictorial space seems to merge with the figures. The heads are frozen in their movement and simultaneously slightly blurred. Something ghostly emerges, as if they had just appeared and were already about to dissolve again. These figures can be interpreted as embodiments of inner states. They appear like mental afterimages of strangers, fragments of a memory that has no fixed origin.
Friedrich Einhoff Kopf mit Haut und Haar, 2002 Acrylic, charcoal and sand on canvas 135 x 110 cm.
Photo: Marcus Schneider Courtesy of theartist andalexander levy, Berlin
Mariechen Danz’s work focuses on the body as a site of knowledge production. It becomes the starting point for critically reflecting on hierarchical knowledge structures, their historical embedding, and the social order. Alphabets, cartography, and scientific models serve as reference systems. At the same time, Danz questions the primacy of hegemonic and Western knowledge production. She opens our eyes to other forms of knowledge, be they physical, oral, or magical.
Mariechen Danz Possible Paths (fossil), 2021Semi-precious stones,fossils, resin3 x 10 x 26 cm (each).
Photo: Marcus Schneider Courtesy of the artist and alexander levy, Berlin
In the upper room of the exhibition, we encounter “Common Carrier Case (X Votive/starmap/ I-a),” a human-like silhouette made of perforated aluminum. Its form is derived from a costume pattern developed by Danz. The light filtering through the perforations casts a shadow on the wall reminiscent of a star map. Transparent organs protrude from the flat, cool form on long, curved rods. By having the rods emerge directly from the walls, the architecture itself becomes part of the body. These casts of human lungs are made of polyurethane and contain ammonites and fossils, thus carrying traces of different times and places and alluding to the superimposition of anatomy with history and geology. Positioned outside the body, the organs demonstrate the interaction of inside and outside and illustrate the ongoing processes of transformation, transmission, and inscription. The forms are based on medical teaching models that Danz continually “operates on” and updates. In this way, they act as carriers of history, politics, culture, and socialization.
Xie Lei Premonition VIII, 2025 Oil on paper 42 x 30 cm.
Courtesy of the artist,alexander levy, Berlin, Siesand Höke, Düsseldorf
A path made of cast insoles containing minerals and gemstones leads to the lower floor. They mark the direction of movement and orientation, while simultaneously serving as a materialization of bodily traces. There, visitors encounter the work “Digestive System 3D” from the “Fossalizing Organs” series, a digestive system erected on a branched, root-like frame, in which two marble eggs are implanted. The body’s internal structures are turned inside out and made visible, augmented by an inherent fossilization process.
Danz’s work demonstrates how knowledge is not only conveyed through texts, models, or maps, but also remains inscribed within the body. Her works map experience like a landscape and make it clear that epistemic systems are historically, hierarchically, and socially shaped.
Mariechen Danz, Friedrich Einhoff, Xie Lei,Carriers, installation view alexander levy, Berlin,
photo: Marcus Schneider, courtesy of the artists, alexander levy, Berlin
On the lower floor, we encounter the rugged figures of Friedrich Einhoff. The focus is not on individual persons, but on anonymized figures that function as stand-ins for our human existence. The spaces in which they appear also remain undefined. Through the use of acrylic mixed with sand, earth, and ash, rough, membrane-like surfaces are created, extending the figures’ skin in texture and transparency. The background appears like a craggy landscape, intertwining figure and space.
The bodies are mostly reduced to torso or head and bear the traces of experience, injury, and time. Delicate, fragile lines are repeatedly applied, reworked, and partially erased, resulting in an interweaving of body and environment: patches of color shift from the head into the surroundings and back again; inside and outside interlock. Withdrawn postures deny direct access, yet simultaneously convey the presence of an inner life that extends into the space. The figures appear suspended, conveying a silent pathos of isolation. The aura surrounding them arises from the materiality of the surface and the lines. His figures make the permanent inscription of experience into the body palpable.
Text by Lydia Ahrens
Exhibition dates: Friday, 27. February – Saturday , 11. April 2026
Image caption: Mariechen DanzLiver (fossil / map toxin), 2018 Marble egg, pigment, resin 23 x 15 x 10 cm. Photo: Marcus Schneider Courtesy of the artist and alexander levy,Berlin
Exhibition Carries – Galerie alexander levy | Contemporary Art – Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin – Exhibition Berlin Galleries – ART at Berlin
