Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to announce Salon, a special temporary exhibition in Athens, Greece presenting work by Günther Förg (1952–2013) and Grace Weaver (b. 1989).

Organised by Sarah Horner, Senior Director at Galerie Max Hetzler, Salon is hosted by Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery in a landmark Grade I Historic building at Tositsa 3, just steps away from the Archaeological and Epigraphic Museums of Athens.

With over 50 years’ history, Galerie Max Hetzler is a global contemporary art gallery with spaces in Berlin, Paris, London and Marfa, Texas. In response to the magnificent surroundings of the heritage building in Athens, the works by Günther Förg and Grace Weaver reflect the gallery’s story by pairing two artists that chart its very beginning and current day roster. Presented across three interconnected rooms, the exhibition positions works by each artist in dialogue with one another.

Günther Förg’s intuitive approach to colour and composition is captured in Untitled, 2002, a significant painting from his ‘Grid Paintings’ (c. 1992–2009), as well as a multi-panel grid of watercolours on paper from the same series. Drawing inspiration from Edvard Munch’s The Death of Marat, 1907, and its colourful crosshatching, Förg focused on Munch’s use of non-figurative elements and colour fields.

The ‘Grid Paintings’ are characterised by layered lines of similar colours and the unorthodox way in which the distinction between negative and positive space threatens to dissolve. Captured in the title of the series is an inherent reference to the rationalist grid found in Modernism. The dominant themes of architecture and windows in Förg’s works are also highlighted through the repetition of rhythm and structure in the 16-part grid of works on paper. Juxtaposed with these two-dimensional works, a bronze torso sculpture by the artist anchors the space, providing a corporeal counterweight, and revealing the artist’s manipulation and expressive gestures of his hand-sculpted lines.

Grace Weaver’s work abounds with art historical and literary references. Across various mediums, Weaver explores quotidian moments of modernity, often with a focus on the feminine experience.

Her compositions are made with a consciousness for the procedure of painting itself: whether in watercolour, oil or acrylic, she develops a unique choreography of chroma and brushwork, resulting in works that disclose an all-over, wet-into-wet, coming together of image and surface.

Presenting Weaver’s paintings for the first time in Greece, Salon features bodies of work centred on the figure, a vehicle through which the artist explores nuances of form and shifting mood. In the intimately scaled Nudes with Grid, Weaver engages with a classical genre within the framework of a grid, nodding to Günther Förg’s ‘Grid Paintings’ in her approach to both colour and layering. Additionally, in her series of paintings with brown lines and black grids, Weaver cites linework in Mycenaean terracotta as an influence. Just as Förg drew inspiration from the Modern Masters, Weaver too is deeply interested in her fellow artists’ thinking and working.

The exhibition also highlights a new series in which Weaver turns from contemporary scenes of 21st century life to universal motifs. Here, she draws inspiration from archaic Greek depictions of mourning women, as well as a Boeotian statuette of a mother and child. Weaver’s wet-into-wet painting method lends her work a watercolour-like freshness. Layering semi-translucent acrylic paint over a base of black in wide rhythmic brushstrokes, the wet background becomes a responsive surface for Weaver’s painted line. The immediacy of the artist’s drawing practice is brought to the fore in the succinct line and lively drips that spot the surface.

Posing in gestures that are at once pensive and performative, the Untitled (Mourners) propose the act of painting as one of both performance and introspection. In these works, Weaver considers the specificity of outward ritual gesture whilst also suggesting the universality of the interior emotion of mourning across centuries.