This video provides you with at tour of the exhibition Back to Back to Back at Galerie Reiter in Berlin, a show that brings together the three artists Christian Holze, Márton Nemes, and Anselm Reyle. The artists engage with image format, materiality, and media transitions in distinct ways, consistently transcending the boundaries of classical genres. Their works converge in a dynamic tension: back to back, image to image. Back to Back to Back opened for Gallery Weekend Berlin 2025 and runs until June 21, 2025.
Back to Back to Back: Christian Holze, Márton Nemes, Anselm Reyle at Reiter Berlin. Berlin (Germany), May 2, 2025.
Exhibition text (excerpts):
“Reiter presents Back to Back to Back, parallel exhibitions in Berlin and Leipzig featuring German artists Christian Holze and Anselm Reyle alongside Hungarian artist Márton Nemes. The three artists, coming back to back, engage with fundamental questions of contemporary painting. Superimposition, material plurality, and the traditional picture format are scrutinised, resulting in what Baudrillard might call an “‘aesthetic’ hallucination of reality.” Uniting their individually transgressive practices, the artists create their alternate versions of reality – self-referential environments in which painting, sculpture, and installation become indistinguishable. Their idiosyncratic painterly techniques and visual systems intensify perceptual experiences. Far exceeding the limits of art historical conventions, the works stimulate material awareness and conceptual cross-referentiality. Together, Holze, Nemes, and Reyle construct total visual and auditory environments that transcend the boundaries between media, subject and object, and the physical and virtual realms. The exhibitions are immaterially linked by an original soundtrack composed by Péter Hencz, based on the artists’ musical preferences – an absorbing soundscape that blends techno, metal, and noise, punctuated by brief moments of acoustic harmony. Released on vinyl, the dual exhibition concept echoes the A/B sides of records.” – Hanna Claris
In the series ‘The Most Boring Artist I Know’, Christian Holze engages with Cy Twombly’s abstract interpretation of Raphaels School of Athens by combining AI-generated image fragments and digital editing with painterly interventions a reflection on art history, appropriation, and the fusion of digital and analog image production.
In the ‘Synchronicity Paintings’, Márton Nemes stages a virtual extension of the painting act by transferring analog brushstrokes into the digital realm and animating them with LED light. Painting thus becomes a multi-layered, simultaneous interplay of materiality and virtuality.
Anselm Reyle’s ceramic objects are cylindrical, glazed, and painted forms treated like painterly surfaces. They merge the craftsmanship of ceramics with the aesthetic of his visual language reflective, color-intensive, and often deliberately imperfect. The works address themes like materiality, everyday culture, and decoration, translating his typical stylistic elements into a sculptural, physical form.
In the ‘Time Sleep’ series, Christian Holze presents the sleeping Ariadne in digitally created sculptural pairings with Adonis or the Dying Gaul. He draws on classical motifs, transforming them through digital reconstruction, duplication, and painterly interventions into hybrid visual worlds exploring the cultural proximity of sleep and death as well as the shifting nature of originality and reproduction in contemporary art.
Márton Nemes’ ‘Sound Paintings’ are hybrid works combining painting with sound. Speakers are integrated into the colorful, often layered wall objects, playing custom-composed sound pieces. Visual and auditory layers merge into multisensory images painting becomes audible, space becomes a resonating body.
Christian Holze’s sculpture ‘Castor & Pollux & Castor & Pollux’ is a multi-layered exploration of authorship, reproduction, and art-historical attribution. It is based on a 3D scan of the Ildefonso Group a Roman marble copy that itself refers to Greek originals and was later modified in the Baroque period. Through digital transformation and duplication, Holze creates a copy of the copy of the copy, exposing the instability of the original. Linked to motifs such as ‘Amor and Psyche’ or ‘Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell’, the sculpture becomes a reflection on cultural heritage and media transmission. Holze’s work merges past and present into a single object and positions itself as a critical, contemporary continuation of historical forms.
A specially produced vinyl record will be released to accompany the Back to Back to Back exhibition, serving as a sonic link between the two exhibition venues and the three participating artists – Christian Holze, Márton Nemes, and Anselm Reyle. The composition, created by Péter Hencz, is based on the musical preferences of the artists.
