Upcoming exhibition: Lennart Grau – INCARNATION

With his new series Incarnation, on view at Galerie Deschler during Berlin Art Week, Berlin-based painter Lennart Grau conjures striking visual worlds that oscillate between theatricality and fragility. His figures—often barely clothed, faceless, caught in dramatic gestures—emerge sculpturally from luminous, watercolor-like backgrounds, only to dissolve back into them a moment later. Painting here becomes a fluid interplay of states of being: corporeal, flowing, ethereal.

In this way, Grau engages with the Baroque tradition of the theatrum mundi, in which the world was staged as a theater. Yet whereas Baroque gesture conveyed religious or heroic meaning, his figures remain untethered from fixed narratives—they drift in the space between expression and emptiness.

This very ambiguity speaks to our present moment: an era of political uncertainty, global crises, and a profound erosion of truth in the age of fake news, AI-generated imagery, and digital self-staging. Incarnation positions painting as a meditation on transience and identity—at once monumental and delicate, an echo of Baroque visual worlds and a mirror of our fragile contemporary condition.