Franziska Klotz, Jan Muche – Das jüngste Gerücht

We are delighted to present two Berlin-based artists together in a joint exhibition for the first time. Titled Das jüngste Gerücht (The Latest Rumour), the exhibition takes its name from a 1963 cabaret program by Wolfgang Neuss. Paintings by Franziska Klotz enter into dialogue with paintings and sculptures by Jan Muche.

Both artists draw inspiration from images that catch their attention—documentaries, historical events, artworks, as well as digital and analogue images reflecting contemporary life. While their works are figurative, both artists frequently employ structures that lend their paintings and sculptures an almost abstract appearance. For them, art is a means of engaging with and questioning the world we inhabit. Their works address themes that move them personally but also speak more broadly about the world as it is—or as we might wish it to be. At the same time, a painting or sculpture always follows its own intrinsic artistic laws, working with colour, form, structure, line, surface, and space. In this way, the works encourage reflection on both the depicted subject and the surrounding world.

Franziska Klotz’s new paintings depict teenage girls, alone or in small groups, as well as everyday objects: chairs in a corner, ice cubes, hot water bottles, a pier, shattered windows, and cracks in a road. All of the works share a common thread: disrupted structure. Chaos and collapse appear everywhere—piers leaning precariously, wilting flowers trapped in ice, cracked windowpanes forming chaotic networks, chairs piled haphazardly, fissured roads and concrete, and hot water bottles held together by makeshift bands.

The teenage girls appear fragile, their arms and legs forming intricate patterns that are sometimes defensive, sometimes inviting. Occasionally, limbs frame particular sections of the image, drawing attention to them. As Ingeborg Ruthe notes, these paintings portray “girls navigating various social media platforms,” each isolated yet connected by shared fears, doubts, and insecurities. They are united through virtual spaces of escape, where their relationship to their bodies mirrors the social fabric—simultaneously introverted and extroverted.

Both the inanimate objects and the figures reveal Klotz’s fascination with disorder and chaos. She confronts the vague and ambivalent, the dark and the unfathomable. Her paintings can be read as commentaries on a time in which established orders and old certainties are dissolving, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Structures also play a central role in Jan Muche’s paintings and sculptures. Long fascinated by motifs from past artistic epochs—particularly the abstractions of Russian Constructivism—his current works set architectural forms into motion. They may recall a Fernand Léger painting pushed off balance or a psychedelically altered work by Willi Baumeister, with echoes of Wassily Kandinsky. These references relate primarily to formal vocabulary; Muche’s colour palette and painterly gesture are unmistakably contemporary and distinctly his own.

This also applies to Muche’s figurative paintings. In the small canvas Gesellen, a gritty, pop-art-inflected reinterpretation of a propaganda image celebrating industrial labour, Muche playfully combines the historical ideal of artistic progress with political aspirations for a new, liberated society. His work is marked by a fascination with the forms and ideas of past eras that is not merely nostalgic. His sculptures, resembling models of utopian architectures yet to be realised, are guided by the conviction that art must be more than a decorative element.

“The latest rumour” surrounding Franziska Klotz and Jan Muche suggests that the works of two seemingly similar Berlin artists enter into a productive dialogue. In their depictions of what was and what is, their works compellingly resist the negation of meaning.

Franziska Klotz (born 1979 in Dresden) received the Max Ernst Scholarship of the City of Brühl and worked in 2015 and 2018 as a fellow of the German Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul at the invitation of the Goethe-Institut. Her works have been exhibited internationally, including at the 56th October Salon in Belgrade (2016), the Fanø Art Museum in Denmark (2017), Hamburger Bahnhof (2018), Kulturforum Schorndorf (2019), and Kunstraum Kreuzberg (2021).

Jan Muche (born 1975 in Herford) trained as a lithographer and was a master student of K. H. Hödicke at the Berlin University of the Arts. His works have been exhibited worldwide, including at Marta Herford (2020), the Torrance Art Museum in California (USA, 2020), Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin (2017), and the Wuhan Art Museum in China (2009).