Hans Josephsohn and Günther Förg at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Berlin: Potsdamer Straße 77-87
5 September – 25 October 2025
In Berlin, at Galerie Max Hetzler, a conversation unfolds not with words but with mass and line, bronze and brushstroke. Hans Josephsohn and Günther Förg – A Dialogue stages a meeting of opposites: Josephsohn’s blunt, weighty figures with their restless surfaces set against Förg’s rigorous yet unstable grid paintings from the 1990s. Reliefs by both punctuate the show, allowing surface and shadow to take on equal importance.
Hans Josephsohn’s presence here is as immediate as a handprint in clay. Working with plaster, later cast in bronze, he searched obsessively for the essence of human form. His half-figures, such as Untitled (Lola) (1996) and Untitled (Madeleine) (2000), blur the line between portrait and archetype. They recall battered monuments or fossils pulled from the earth, their surfaces marked with the urgency of touch. As the gallery notes, Josephsohn sought “réalité vivante” — a living reality — through accumulation and erasure of material. What results is less likeness than force: dense presences that push back at the viewer with a stubborn corporeality.
Förg, by contrast, arrives through the eye rather than the hand. His Untitled (1995), a green-black-blue cross-hatched grid, radiates a flickering instability. The verticals and horizontals, laid on with a heavy, painterly insistence, nearly dissolve into fabric when viewed from a distance. In Untitled (1996), ochre impasto grids mask and reveal a green background, the interplay of opacity and translucence evoking both structure and sabotage. Förg’s grids are never about perfection—they are about breakdown, about painting’s ability to unmoor itself from certainty while still holding the surface taut.
Seen together, the two artists sharpen each other. Josephsohn’s lumpen half-figures insist on weight, volume, and permanence. Förg’s canvases, on the other hand, are all shimmer and surface, their structures threatening to collapse into pure gesture. Yet both hover in a liminal space: Josephsohn between portrait and abstraction, Förg between painting and architecture. Their works complicate the categories they are assigned to—sculpture that seems too raw to monumentalize, painting that refuses to settle into design.
There is also history embedded in this unlikely pairing. As the press release notes, Förg only became familiar with Josephsohn’s sculpture in the late 1990s and was captivated by its uncompromising materiality. He advocated for the older artist’s work, bringing it to the attention of Rudi Fuchs, then director of the Stedelijk Museum, which led to Josephsohn’s breakthrough Amsterdam exhibition in 2002. That gesture—an artist championing another—underscores the sense of dialogue here, one that is both artistic and intergenerational.
The reliefs upstairs seal this exchange. Josephsohn’s bronze slabs, like compressed bodies, meet Förg’s concrete panels, where pigment and aggregate settle into light-absorbing planes. These works flatten the dimensional differences between the two artists, revealing a shared concern with surface as site—where weight meets image, and where light decides what is revealed and what remains obscure. The pairing makes palpable what the gallery calls a “dialogical exhibition”: one where the viewer completes the conversation simply by standing between weight and grid, surface and shadow.