I was lucky to see André Butzer’s new paintings on a sunny winter day, with natural light coming in to make visible what is hidden in their black surfaces. There were eight big and nine medium-size dark paintings in Galerie Max Hetzler’s Bleibtreustraße location, along with one very large and colorful canvas, a small work on paper executed in colored pencil and crayon, and an artist’s book. The dark paintings each have a sort of vertical seam, right of the center, where light seems to come through, sometimes clear, most often faint. Around this so-called Fuge, or gap, brushwork is visible, dark

The photographs of Bernhard Fuchs are out of time, but not nostalgic. They are neither classicizing nor do they revisit a romanticized image of a glorious past. Rather, Fuchs displays a world apart, seemingly removed from contemporary concerns. This attitude already characterized the series of books this student of Bernd Becher has produced since the 1990s, each of which, often focusing on his home country of Austria, is dedicated to a single theme, such as landscape (Waldungen [2014]), farmyards (Höfe [2011]), and even cars (Autos—Fotografien [2006]). It was once again evident in the

Birgit Megerle’s exhibition “Soft Power” contained some memorable works, but one in particular has stayed with me. Kid Woolf, 2018, is one of several paintings by Megerle based on the covers of the magazine Emma; it shows Nicole Kidman in the role of Virginia Woolf in the 2002 film The Hours. Here, the literary icon has become precisely that: an icon, an image, an actor’s impersonation gracing the cover of one of Germany’s oldest and most widely circulated feminist magazines. Megerle’s show demonstrated that the iconic is not necessarily the superficial, and that becoming an icon is not necessarily