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 etherial, to what remains when seemingly nothing remains. Gröting assembles minimal forms into a story: an imprint is all that’s left from an intimate moment between two women; a washing machine performs gentle, meditative, and barely perceptible movements. A cold stainless steel heart, pierced by a needle, poses the question under which conditions one/men defends one’s /their country. The pig is deflated. Next door, in a dimly lit room, two miniature versions stand opposite each other, a double bed and a hut, leaving barely any room to breathe.

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.

References to the domestic sphere, a place of retreat but also of reproductive labor, historically associated with the feminine, appear in two works which rather allude to the objects than depicting them: a made but empty double bed seems to sink under its own weight. Washing Machine (2024) on the other hand, reduces this almost indispensable appliance to a white, smooth pedestal with the typical dimensions of household appliances, 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.