THE GALLERY BECOMES A STAGE
For Berlin Art Week 2026, German artist André Wendland turns BETTER GO SOUTH into something between a gallery, a theatre and a particularly elaborate visual trick. Titled On Stage, the solo exhibition explores the language of performance spaces and set design through large-format paintings populated by curtains, proscenium-like frames, props and strangely theatrical fragments of everyday life. Created during a summer residency in Berlin, the series treats looking itself as a staged event, asking how framing, placement and light can quietly choreograph the way people perceive a space.
Taking cues from John Cage’s attention to ordinary sound, Wendland shifts that logic toward the visual, treating seemingly unremarkable elements as material for an engineered spectacle. The canvas becomes less a window onto a scene than part of the scenery itself. Curtains conceal as much as they reveal, hands emerge before slipping away again, and objects appear cropped or enlarged until their original scale becomes uncertain. Nothing particularly dramatic needs to happen; the set is already doing plenty of work.
André Wendland, A Storm is Coming, 2026, oil on canvas
CARTOON LOGIC MEETS STAGE DESIGN
Executed in oil and acrylic, the paintings use a graphic vocabulary of simplified outlines, exaggerated proportions and sharply defined fields of color. Wendland describes this approach through an ‘economy of exaggeration’, reducing architectural and human forms while amplifying just enough of them to make each image feel slightly unreal. The artist’s broader practice similarly draws on cartoons and pop culture, often working at large scale and adapting installations to their surroundings.
Lighting becomes another stage prop. Luminous expanses of color meet hard drop-shadows and oversized close-ups, creating the impression that the subjects are being illuminated from somewhere behind the canvas. The effect borrows from classic animation and vintage stage design without settling completely into either. Instead, Wendland uses their visual shorthand to make flat paintings behave spatially, extending their artificial glow into the surrounding gallery and blurring where image ends and set begins.
André Wendland, Born Ready I, 2026, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T
The recurring curtain becomes the exhibition’s most obvious accomplice. Wendland uses draped forms, disembodied hands and hand puppets to construct small sleight-of-hand scenarios in which visibility is constantly negotiated. A gesture might suggest that something is about to be revealed, while the painting stubbornly keeps it hidden. Elsewhere, puppets stand in for human performers, reinforcing the slightly uneasy idea that what appears spontaneous may have been directed all along.
In this sense, On Stage makes the viewer another participant in its choreography. Moving through BETTER GO SOUTH, visitors encounter paintings conceived not simply as isolated surfaces but as spatial interventions that alter the atmosphere around them. The exhibition debuts during Berlin Art Week at the gallery’s Berlin space on Brunnenstraße, with BETTER GO SOUTH listing Wendland’s solo presentation from September 9, 2026. By borrowing the machinery of theatre without providing the expected performance, Wendland leaves one small complication behind: once everything looks staged, the audience starts looking suspicious too.
André Wendland, Born Ready II, 2026, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
André Wendland, Noise-Cancelling, 2026, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
André Wendland, Echoes, 2026, oil on canvas
André Wendland, Can you believe it?, 2025, oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm
André Wendland, Entrance, 2026, oil on canvas
project info:
name: André Wendland ‘On Stage’ for Berlin Art Week
gallery: BETTER GO SOUTH | @bettergosouth
designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. See more project submissions from our readers here.
edited by: Iñaki Laguardia | designboom