Artists

Monty Richthofen

Press release

The exhibition features a new series of eleven text-based abstractions installed in a rhythmic procession along the walls of the main gallery space, with each work uniformly measuring 200 x 170 cm. It also includes a new series of works on paper, framed under tinted acrylic glass.

Richthofen’s latest body of work pushes the boundary between language and abstraction. Drawings and paintings incorporating text fragments—sometimes bold, sometimes illegible and obscure, blurred, sprayed over, or blacked out—reflect a tension between revelation and concealment.

The paintings form an integral part of the poem “Swallowed Bullets,” composed by Richthofen and incorporated into a live performance, accompanied by composer and pianist John Carlsson on the occasion of the show’s opening. The audience is invited to engage with the poem as a multisensory experience. Its essence can be encountered both through the ephemeral, auditory immediacy of the live performance and the enduring presence of its abstracted words dispersed on the canvases throughout the exhibition space.

I fell asleep day dreaming
And I woke up to
A nightmare I never dreamed of living

We are the plague
And
We are the cure
Corrupt
And yet so pure

—Excerpt from Monty Richthofen, SWALLOWED BULLETS, 2025

On the occasion of the exhibition, the gallery will publish an essay by Laura Helena Wurth in both German and English, available prior to the opening in February 2025.

Monty Richthofen (b. Munich, 1995) is a Berlin-based artist whose work challenges conventional poetry by visualizing text through painting, public writings, and tattooing. He studied performance practice and design at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts in London, graduating in 2018. In 2024, notable exhibitions included ECCENTRIC: Aesthetics of Freedom at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Capsule at Luxembourg Art Week, and THANK GOD GOD IS DEAD at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein