What is painting after? Here we have an artist and an exhibition that relentlessly pose this question. Can painting exist today except by reflecting on itself? It doesn’t want to exceed itself, but it must in order to accommodate the world, human beings, and even the conditions of art’s production.

Peter Nadin’s paintings resemble equations that ultimately exist only in order to introduce a “genuine” unknown quantity. The goal is not to solve the equation, but to construct it; not only to limit but also to expand the unknowns. Imagine all the things one can do with x, with the unknown. Imagine

What is painting after? Memory and organization. To dissolve, to constitute itself. To do something vicariously for others or for itself? To capture a special kind of reminiscence—personal history, time spent with painting, the resulting disillusionment because painting as the trace of genius is all that remains.

Georg Baselitz’s new work is both monumental and light at the same time. It fills an entire room, but is neither massive nor monolithic. Instead, it is decentralized in a series of 20 individual components that form a continuous strip of pictures. In the catalogue, Siegfried Gohr calls

Characterized by his unsocialized humor, Werner Büttner’s work traces the putrefaction of ideals through visual and literary objects. Toward this end, Büttner pursues a formal bastardization of writing/text and drawing/painting. The outcome is a blend of play, mockery, bitterness, and earnestness. The half-truths of our artistic and political cultures are transmitted by means of electrifying brainstorms, without the sweat of the artist’s brow and without intrusive egocentrism. “You can’t always read between the lines, you’ll go crazy”: that’s the lapidary comment included with the depiction of