Urban Spree Galerie presents «Switch-Over« , the third solo exhibition of the Berlin-based visual artist Hendrik Czakainski at Urban Spree Galerie.

Hendrik Czakainski’s materia prima is the urban matter captured at different stages of dereliction. Adopting a bird’s eye view, the artist creates large-scale post-architectural panels which are dark anatomical explorations of the urban body.

The artist becomes a forensic architect, collecting evidence of disasters, past, present and future, incorporating them in surreal compositions of large proportions, creating 3-dimensional landscapes which have become void of human presence and frightfully beautiful at the same time. His creations bring us to a state of contemplation and fascination, owing to the combination of shape and colour.

His monumental cuts, holes, and excisions to his fantastic architectural matter reach us beyond the scope of architecture and strip down those man-made artefacts to the minimum, lay them bare, and essentially on the brink of abstraction.

In Switch-Over, the artist distantiates himself from the highly densified housing settlements he has been creating in the past years to pursue a more radical approach. His apocalyptic tableaux give away few clues as to when the mutations happened, what exactly happened, how was it even possible to switch from one state to the next, and which situation we are actually in, leaving the spectator forging his own clues. Are we investigating a foregone reality, are we already processing the next move, or are we trapped in between ?

In his new compositions, we ask ourselves if humanity is still part of the global equation or if the tipping point has been already reached; if a reversal is even possible.

Most works of the show are constructed in two or three parts, creating a dynamic impulse, searching for life in interstitial space, infusing tension, and establishing a mutual dialog, a new social contract of what’s left.