carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to announce Herz, Asta Gröting’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.   

Paradoxically, an atmosphere of emptiness constitutes the heart of this exhibition. Like a delayed echo it alludes to the absent, the intangible, to what remains when seemingly nothing remains. From minimal forms Gröting tells a story: squares on the floor become a double bed, a washing machine performs gentle, rocking movements, all that remains of an intimate moment between two women is an imprint, a cold heart of stainless steel with a needle poses the question under which conditions one/men defends one’s /their country. The pig is deflated.

With these gestures, Gröting creates a poetry of space within space, where the material works become protagonists just as much as the relationships between the objects themselves. In this exhibition, Gröting confronts us with the intimate and familiar, the everyday. However, she does so in a subtle way with a slight distortion, so that the ‘homely’ threatens to tip over into the uncanny and alien. Exhibiting a form of inner life, she yet leaves open its precise definition and the question of what exactly it is made up by. In Space Between Two Women Having Sex (2024), Gröting took a direct impression with silicone during the sexual act between two women. The palpable void between the individuals is turned inside out and mirrored from bottom to top – Gröting thus performs a kind of sculptural autopsy, both literally and conceptually. The negative space between two people becomes an object, bringing to light the unspoken, the secret and the hidden. What remains of the moment is the other side, the ‘underside’ of the self. In the laser light installation Atemkurve (2025) Gröting brings to surface a process our bodies perform every moment of our lives, which usually happens automatically: breathing in and out, taking in fresh oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide from the blood. Oxygen, as a shared and vital resource that is invisible to the naked eye, can be seen as a metaphor for the essence of Gröting’s exhibition: her works make visible what seems obvious or hidden, inviting us to rethink this implicitness.

With the two works Doppelbett (2025) and Waschmaschine (2024) are barely tangible due to their minimal, suggestive form allude to the domestic sphere, a place of retreat but also of reproductive labour, historically conflated with the feminine. Four slightly curved rectangles become a made but empty double bed. Made of polystyrene, they seem to float feather-light above the exhibition floor. Polystyrene is a moisture-resistant and heat-insulating material used to protect sensitive objects. Waschmaschine, on the other hand, reduces this almost indispensable appliance to a white pedestal with the typical dimensions of household appliances, the so-called white goods. The pedestal performs very slow, barely perceptible horizontal and vertical movements.

Instead of retreating into the private sphere, the artist highlights its political dimensions. The pig, is closely linked to the history of human civilization through its domestication. Due to its intelligence and physiological similarity to humans, pigs are frequently used in medicine and research as laboratory animals. Lying flat on its side, Dancing Queen (2024) becomes a projection surface for these controversies, but above all it prompts us to reflect on the human relationship with living beings and the environment. The cold, chrome-coloured ‘heart’ draws on the symbolic imension of this vital organ. It represents a centre, a core, which must also be protected by the rib cage. Combined with the German national colours, this work reveals an ambivalence between a sense of belonging, a certain atmosphere in which one grew up, on the one hand, and the consequences of confronting painful history and political injustices on the other. Gröting puts her finger on the wound of current tensions.