ART COLOGNE

Galerie Max Hetzler is delighted to present works by Leilah Babirye, André Butzer, William N. Copley, Sarah Crowner, Rineke Dijkstra, Elmgreen & Dragset, Barry Flanagan, Günther Förg, Katharina Grosse, Friedrich Kunath, Jake Longstreth, Sabine Moritz, Albert Oehlen, Raphaela Simon, Thomas Struth, Janaina Tschäpe, Rinus Van de Velde, Edmund de Waal and Grace Weaver.

‘When I’m walking around New York and see a rusted piece of metal, it’s beautiful to me. It inspires a new sculpture or might fit into something I’m already working on. Being queer, sometimes we’re made to feel discarded by society as if we are trash. My work rejects that hateful mindset. I’m here to say, “You are beautiful.”’

Leilah Babirye, 2024

‘A similarly colourful and punchy group of works derived from images taken from pornographic magazines. Compositionally true to their sources but rendered with a variety of Copley’s typical figurative distortions, the works show couples and individuals in explicitly sexual poses and embraces. The industrious self-absorption of the protagonists is undercut by all manner of playful or baroque patterns enjambed in incidental couches, wallpapers and bedspreads.’

Toby Kamps, 2016

‘The artists turn the familiar and easily recognizable into something extraordinary by revealing the complexity of what might not normally be considered worth highlighting.’

Leigh Arnold, 2024

‘When pressed against one another, these two colors [orange and green] have the uncanny effect of lifting the image off the canvas, suggesting a painting that hovers over its support as opposed to being wedded to it. Thus, Grosse seemingly drives a wedge between what appears on the surface of her paintings and the physical support beneath them.’

Colin Lang, 2025

‘In the end nostalgia means memory without the pain, and once you’ve realized that, there’s an amazing technique for dealing with it: irony.’

Friedrich Kunath, 2021

‘I don’t make any distinctions; dark images emerge automatically and in between there are also very light ones. It creates a strong effect. In fact, I like to see light, seemingly harmless things on a level with brutal, violent things. Playful things can be as profound as a murder weapon. After all, these two aspects dwell in my one soul.’

Raphaela Simon, 2022

‘In his museum photographs, Thomas Struth adds a third element to the discourse between motif and viewer. The people in these photographs, visiting museums, churches and historic buildings, have entered into a particular relationship with the works of art on show. And it is this connection that is the main focus of Struth’s interest.’

Anette Kruszynski, 2010

‘I think it’s a search for a landscape inside us all. We all carry those landscapes because we have emotional attachments to situations connected to nature, like sunsets and watching the horizon. It’s like this eternal longing.’

Janaina Tschäpe, 2024

‘For me, a vessel is the simplest image I have got for a held breath. That’s what my vessels are. They contain a series of movements that I have made with the most basic of all materials in the world, which is the earth. And by doing that I am just holding a small part of the world and containing it.’

Edmund de Waal, 2023