Grace Weaver. Parataxis

Sunday 13 September 2026, the last day of Berlin Art Week. At Soy Capitán, Lindenstraße 34, Grace Weaver's "Parataxis" has been hanging since 4 September and runs until 24 October. According to the accompanying text laid out on the counter, Soy Capitán and Galerie Max Hetzler are presenting the exhibition jointly in their Berlin spaces; Hetzler sits at Bleibtreustraße 45, right across the city.

The room is a white cube that does not hide where it comes from. Above the walls sits a white-painted trapezoidal sheet ceiling with a steel beam and exposed pipework, and below it three long fluorescent battens. The floor is polished concrete with a visible expansion joint. The paintings hang singly, far apart, all at the same centre height, in very narrow dark shadow-gap frames you stop noticing from two metres away.

What is painted are figures too large for their picture space. The largest canvas, a good two and a half metres tall, shows a figure sitting frontally on a brown wooden chair, the head small and pink, two braids sticking out horizontally, the face reduced to four lines. Knees and arms hit the edges. The body is built from single broad strokes of the brush, each one traceable; the bristle tracks are left open and the paint sits ridged where a stroke ends. Behind the figure a cream ground with vertical yellow stripes, on the left a pale blue two-handled amphora on an ochre console, above it a dark blue conical lamp.

Around the corner the vocabulary repeats, and that is where the exhibition's joke lies. A large horizontal canvas shows two figures at a small dark table, three vessels between them, another conical lamp above, the ground striped again, this time in red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Beside it, much smaller, a frontal figure holding a two-handled amphora in both hands. The same stage, the same vessel, the same lamp, a different gesture. What is set up as a domestic scene plays out as a ceremony, built in strict symmetry, and the repetition across three paintings turns everyday life into ritual.

I name no titles. The accompanying text lay out in two languages and could be read; the work list with its six entries could not. On my photographs the titles, years and dimensions cannot be deciphered even enlarged, and attributions from memory would be misleading.

One corner further on hangs something that does not belong to this painting: two flat profile heads in fired clay, turned towards each other, one with a gold clip in its hair, the other with a real plaited braid hanging free down the wall. From each head a fabric-covered cable loops down into a socket just above the floor. Here the building's wiring becomes part of the composition. Beside them a glazed relief and a framed photograph of a rolled-up yellow hose in front of a concrete wall. No label I could read said who made them.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 13 September 2026.