Where We’re Going We Need Roads

Artists

Jake Longstreth

Press release

Opening: Friday, 13 March, 6 – 8pm

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present Where We’re Going We Need Roads, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Jake Longstreth. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, and his second in Berlin.

For this exhibition, Longstreth presents a new body of oil on canvas paintings and works on paper from 2025 and 2026. Depicting distant highways punctuated by tiny, ant-like cars, amidst vast, hazy expanses, the works are foregrounded by an abundance of trees and plants: California buckwheat, red-berried toyons, lilacs, manzanita, canyon oaks, and eucalyptus. In these new paintings, Longstreth has moved further into the brush and bramble of the region’s hillsides, registering seasonal shifts from spring’s unexpected verdancy to autumn’s brittle dryness underfoot. Yet the roads persist, always present in the distance, carrying the implied ambient hum of traffic. Even in elevated, seemingly remote places, there is a constant din, ‘to live here like we do, we need roads,’ Longstreth explains, ‘but of course, the paintings are silent.’

The views assembled in these works were gathered during Longstreth’s hikes along the region’s dense network of trails that wind through nearly every canyon. In contrast to his earlier paintings of chain restaurants and corporate retail seen from the car, these images are shaped by a slower, bodily encounter with the landscape. Still, the underlying question remains: what is beautiful? A distant golf course, a white Lexus speeding along the freeway; above it, an old oak tree, tangled undergrowth, a mountain lion concealed in shadow. The cry of a hawk, wind moving through leaves, a dump truck reversing. The paintings emphasise depth and spatial layering, moving away from flattened architectural space and instead focusing on carefully observed, lovingly rendered leaves and plants. Nature and infrastructure coexist in delicate proximity, each sharpening the presence of the other.

In the works on canvas, Longstreth adopts a more formally demanding approach, articulating foreground, middle ground, and background with precision, while allowing spatial distances to gently dissapate. Flecks of light from the sun catching on distant cars punctuate the highways, as dense foliage presses into the foreground. The paintings unfold within the muted haze that characterises a Los Angeles morning, a soft atmospheric veil that lingers before gradually burning off as the day progresses. Situated earlier in the day than Longstreth’s previous works, these canvases are suspended in a moment of quiet transition, where the familiar brightness of Southern California gives way to a more measured, contemplative mood.

The highways that thread through these paintings quietly anchor the exhibition’s title, Where We’re Going We Need Roads, a phrase that reverses the famous closing declaration from Robert Zemeckis’ film Back to the Future, 1985. Despite decades of innovation, and the promise of autonomous mobility, movement remains tethered to one of humanity’s most enduring inventions: the wheel. And the wheel, inevitably, requires roads. Longstreth’s landscapes ground us in the present, where highways and cars cut through living terrain, binding natural cycles to the infrastructures that sustain contemporary life.

In the works on paper, titled Eucalyptus Leaves 1-8, Longstreth layers close-up views of swaying branches over the dissolving distances of a grey LA day. The eucalyptus leaves appear in a wide register of colour: cool mints, warm olives, muted browns, pumpkin oranges, and unexpected magentas. These works on paper provide a space for testing improvised composition. Longstreth painted the leaf forms rapidly, without revision; on paper there is only a single opportunity. Offering glimpses through the branches and leaves, the finely calibrated compositions of the canvases fall away, replaced by a lighter, more playful sensibility. Presented together, these works offer a reflection on attention, proximity, and persistence, tracing how landscapes, both natural and constructed, continue to shape our movement, our vision, and our place in the world.

Jake Longstreth (b. 1977, Sharon, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. The artist received his MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2005. His work was the subject of an institutional solo exhibition at Crisp Ellert Museum, Flagler College, St. Augustine in 2017. Longstreth’s work is in the public collections of Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, among others.