DREI: Stamina
Stephan Dillemuth, Matthias Groebel, Julia Scher
New location: Gertrudenstrasse 24 – 28, 50667, Cologne
February 27 – April 4, 2026
In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a character famously dreams of how beautiful it would be if one could hurl a bomb into pure mathematics. Walking into DREI’s new gallery space on Gertrudenstraße in Cologne, one gets the distinct, thrilling impression that this metaphorical explosive has already detonated. The exhibition Stamina unites three formidable veterans of the German art ecosystem—Stephan Dillemuth, Matthias Groebel, and Julia Scher—whose output has expanded key aesthetic discourses since the twilight of the 1980s.
These are not artists who peddle the slick, digestible banalities that clutter so much of the global art circuit. They are uncompromising mavericks who have paved their own paths. Groebel was forging his complex, technoid photo-emulsion paintings back when telephones still required rotary dials, merging the painterly with the profoundly unsettling. Scher, a visionary of our paranoid age, began mapping the eerie contours of media voyeurism long before the surveillance state became our daily reality. Her jagged 1990s drawings present amputated limbs and brutalised forms that feel viscerally prophetic. Dillemuth, meanwhile, engineered a radical “bohemistic research” that shattered the boundary between aesthetic production and lived rebellion, leaving us with gloriously bizarre, encrusted sculptural reliefs.
Dominating the pristine white walls of the gallery with raw, almost vandalistic energy, this installation features the phrase “IN THE LANGUAGE OF COLLISIONS CREATURES” rendered in dripping, oversized black spray paint. The aggressive, horizontal strikethrough of the word “COLLISIONS” serves a dual purpose: it acts as a violent linguistic redaction while physically intersecting a delicate, horizontal sequence of small-scale works on paper anchored directly along its path. This bold architectural intervention perfectly captures the unapologetic, deviant ethos of the Stamina exhibition, creating a visceral juxtaposition between the loud, sweeping gesture of street-level defacement and the intimate, vulnerable scale of the pieces nestled within it. It is a powerful spatial disruption that transforms the gallery from a neutral container into a site of active, rebellious friction.
What truly binds them, as the show’s title suggests, is sheer endurance. It is the unvarnished grit required to maintain unorthodox, countercultural protocols—whether rooted in punk, bohemia, or cypherpunk—through the lean, underfunded years of a working biography. Cologne itself serves as their great point of convergence, even if they each represent vastly different temporalities and divergent trajectories within the city’s mythologised narrative.
Stamina is a triumph of difficult, necessary art. It is an exhibition that looks at the detritus of our techno-social evolution and theatrically questions its very “thingness”. This is not a show seeking to soothe you; it demands the continual destruction and reconfiguration of your understanding of what an artwork can be. And thank heavens for that.