Matthias Gmeiner, Wells

"…
windows that open into windowless rooms
steps that finish at the beginning of steps –
everything in sight falls easily
into the onlooker's eye.

at the bottom of the eye is a well
down the well is a city
in the centre of that city

at the well's edge
I lean over and fall
…"

Extract from The Well by Maarja Pärtna, translated by Jayde Will.



The title of the exhibition, Wells, came to us simultaneously during my visit to Matthias’s studio in Karlsruhe. It first emerged from a descriptive impulse, prompted by the painting entitled History Painting, which, incidentally, does not really depict a well, but rather a kind of empty fountain or basin. This almost reflexive imprecision nevertheless describes quite well what runs through the works in this exhibition.

The question of representation, this “old story,” lies at the heart of Matthias’s entire practice. I call it an old story because it is, fundamentally, one of the most essential and repeatedly addressed questions in the history of painting: not what to paint, but how to paint. One might also add: why paint? (today)

In Maarja Partna’s poem, translated by Jayde Will, the well is associated with the eye, or rather with vision. Beyond the pupil, this well of the visible becomes an abstract depth in which both reality and the subject seem to lose themselves. What remains there, however, may belong to the order of residue, of an impression in the technical sense, of a trace, of a burn. How, then, can one paint from this trace that reality imprints upon us?

The task is double: to restore the concreteness of objects and cities that do indeed exist outside the eye, while at the same time acknowledging our inability to understand precisely how the eye manages to make these objects and cities appear to us in their most convincing materiality. The more one looks, the more one becomes lost in the paradoxes of the visible. One moves toward its limits; one seeks to make the line, the edge, appear. Perhaps this is where Matthias’s work is situated: in this search for the visible, and for what painting can do with it.

Matthias Gmeiner (*1998) lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany. He will graduate in 2026 from David Ostrowski’s class at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe.
Recent exhibitions include PALMAR, Braunsfelder, Cologne (Jan 2026 - Solo), After the afternoon, Regionale 26, Kunsthalle Basel (Nov 2025 - Group).