Rebecca Brodskis. Nobody Meets Anyone's Eye

Two heads crowned with pink hair lean together against a red-orange ground, one hand resting at the other figure's chin. Closeness could hardly be painted more plainly, and still their eyes don't meet. The painting hangs alone on a white wall beside the lettering with the artist's name and the title, and it sets the rule for the whole show: on Rebecca Brodskis' larger canvases nobody is alone, and no gaze meets another. "The Last Ones Awake" has been hanging in the Vault at St. Agnes in Kreuzberg since 9 September.

The former church, built in the 1960s, has been run by König Galerie since May 2015. The Vault is the low room with concrete columns in the middle of the plan. It has white walls, exposed concrete on the columns and ceiling, track spots and a polished floor. The show opened on 8 September during Berlin Art Week with a performance by the dancer Aurora.

Three paintings hang side by side on the long wall, heads three to a canvas, pushed into one another like a hand of cards being fanned out. One figure looks up and out of the picture, the next past the first to the right, and a third has her eyes half closed. Hardly anyone looks the viewer in the eye either. The hair is almost flat black with fine pale strands, the clothes orange and yellow, the ground pale green to turquoise or orange. On the end wall, a smaller fourth painting shows a face lying sideways against yellow, a hand at its mouth. Hung together, the three large ones lose something. The scheme of diagonally stacked heads is quickly learned, and by the third canvas you see the method more than the people.

The woman in the yellow robe stands in front of a pale disc and spiky green leaves, her hair a light cloud of curls. She is one of the few figures who look more or less straight out of the picture. Behind her shoulder a second face is half visible, heavy-lidded and partly hidden by a leaf. It too looks out of the picture, and the two never look at each other. Further along the same wall, things get smaller. Two panels show single faces, one with red lips, one in a pale cap against dark teal, and wherever someone is alone, the series seems to have only passport-photo size to spare.

On the wall behind, two larger paintings stack figures in blue swimsuits on top of one another like swimmers at the edge of a pool. Hands rest on other people's shoulders and heads against other people's necks, and in one, someone else's fingers are at the mouth of a woman with a black bob. Nowhere in the show do bodies get closer, and even here nobody looks at anybody else.

Brodskis was born in France in 1988, studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and at Central Saint Martins in London, graduating in 2010, and lives and works in Paris. The people she paints are close friends from her years in Berlin. The gallery describes the series as a portrait of a city remembered through the people who shared it, and each painting as a fragment of a collective memory rather than a likeness. That turns out to be true almost to the letter. Of the city itself there is next to nothing, no street, no room, only flat grounds, leaves and a pale disc. Berlin turns up only in the people. The people are together in the composition but never in a look, so the paintings feel more like memory than a group photo among friends.

In the chapel of St. Agnes, Monira Al Qadiri is showing "The Archaeology of Beasts". Gilded wheat stalks line the walls, and two glossy black figures stand in the darkened room, the Egyptian gods Khnum and Anubis according to the gallery. Anubis, jackal-headed, holds a staff and an ankh.

The Vault does the paintings a favour. The columns stand so that you never see all the paintings at once. Whichever one you face, another is hidden, and at the far end a column cuts halfway across the portrait of a blond man in a blue polo shirt, his hand at his mouth. So the hang repeats what the paintings show: you are in the same room as everyone, and you never see them all.

Rebecca Brodskis, "The Last Ones Awake", is at König Galerie, St. Agnes, Kreuzberg, Berlin, until 8 November.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 12 September 2026.