carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to announce the group exhibition, Surrounding You: Part II, opening on Friday, 2 May 2025, 6 – 9 pm, on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin. Featuring works by Anna Bella Geiger, Alexandra Grant, Paul Graham, Asta Gröting, Pakui Hardware, Paul Pfeiffer, Laure Prouvost and Ian Waelder.

This exhibition is the second chapter in an evolving curatorial project, unfolding in dialogue with the gallery’s ongoing program. Like a thread unraveling from a spool, Surrounding You expands outward, drawing together multiple viewpoints on how artists engage with their environment. The works resonate as individual pulses within a shared current, revealing a field of interwoven perspectives where each contribution stands as both a personal gesture and a connective strand, proposing ways to see, feel, and situate ourselves within shifting realities.

In Paul Graham’s Agfa Agfacolor XRS400 (New Europe) 1989, abstraction gives way to recognition since what first appears as a pattern of colors unveils itself as a detail of film grain. By focusing so tightly on the medium, Graham exposes the physical architecture behind image-making, hovering between what we perceive and what remains unseen. The piece becomes an invitation to look slowly, to question  the materiality that underpins visual experience. The simplicity of form contradicts the complexity of the act of seeing and we are reminded of what is revealed, what is obscured, and what persists. In the same token, Paul Pfeiffer excavates by exposing the ghost in the machine of image culture through a split, mirrored, and alien rendered Michael Jackson, nearly unrecognizable, looping on an LCD screen in a monstrous, glitchy, hypnotic dance. The title itself (Live Evil), a palindrome, mirrors his aesthetic strategy: reflection as mutation. Through repetition, the familiar turns estranged and the stripping of the spectacle, its seductive veneer, reveals a hollow core where identity flickers and entertainment becomes a site of existential disquiet.

Through segmented canvases and layered references, Anna Bella Geiger examines how fragmented knowledge can be reassembled. The painting that is shown in this context opens onto a complex expanse: elements recall Baroque theatricality while maintaining a minimalist restraint, a rust-toned patina suggests time’s wear, while aerial imagery implies cartographic or emotional landscapes. Geiger’s work resists fixed interpretation, offering instead a map of associations that challenges how visual language constructs meaning, territory, and memory. The latter, in the case of Ian Waelder’s work, inspired by his grandfather (a German pianist who fled Nazi Germany), becomes both a tribute and an inquiry. A clay nose affixed at the artist’s height nods to inherited identity and the act of remembrance while the upright structure mimics a piano’s silhouette. Waelder’s practice is diaristic and reality based yet abstract, layering biography with metaphor. This work invites viewers into a quiet procession around its form, revealing fragments of a story half-told that explores the weight of history, the echo of family, and the fragile continuity of cultural memory.

Asta Gröting´s Blade of Grass hanged beside a black glass block supported by an amber colored organic form, presents an interface between nature and human intervention. The work references Kubrick’s 2001 monolith reimagined: not as alien artifact, but as a botanical marvel since it highlights grass’s evolutionary adaptability,  genomic richness, and structural genius. Gröting’s work amplifies this complexity, transforming the mundane and the overlooked intelligence of plant life into monument. Similarly, the transformation of the ordinary into something extraordinary can be seen in Alexandra Grant’s wire constellation of poet Wisława Szymborska’s words, which forms an ephemeral matrix that casts delicate shadows on the background with the help of light. Built from the repeated phrase ‘I prefer,’ the work materializes a branching process of choices that ultimately shapes the poet’s identity when language becomes visible and its resonance lingers before us. While the sculptural lines evoke a clear sense of personality, the title of the work (Possibilities) also reminds us that these choices could be possibilities, like shadows, that can shift with time and perspective.

Pakui Hardware’s sculptural works explore the lasting scars of ecological and social trauma through two series. On the one hand, Heat Treated reflects on the toxic legacy of Sosnowsky’s hogweed which leaves blistering marks on bodies through pieces that resemble futuristic fossils, embedded with traces of this plant, medical tools, and industrial waste beneath a molten surface. And, on the other hand, in Inflammation, glass hot spots trace nerve-like forms allude to how systemic injustice and historical oppression manifest as chronic pain inscribed in the body over time.

In a related but distinct approach, Laure Prouvost’s sculpture Mouth Branch features a twig extending from the wall with human parts, subtly echoing the idea of human-plant entanglement within a shared ecological space. The central piece of this exhibition, Prouvost´s VR headset, emerges from a basket of brittle branches, suggesting a porous boundary between the digital and the organic, creating a surreal ecosystem that embodies the philosophy of the project. Like her bird sculptures, it embodies fluidity, navigates language, gesture, and dream, and nothing remains fixed, everything is becoming.

Together, the works in Surrounding You construct a layered field of relations building up a space where ideas are not static but in motion, meaning dissolves and reconstitutes through perception and everyone is invited to become part of a shifting network.