BETWEEN
BETWEEN, 2025
12 works: eight paintings (oil on canvas, size 90 x 70 cm and 40 x 30 cm), four puzzles (digital print on cardboard, size 65 x 49 cm with frame and glass)
Jochen Hempel Art Gallery. Leipzig, Germany
The theme of exhibition is “De/construction of Painting”, in which the artist explore questions such as: to what extent is the idea of an image/painting still a cultural construct within various dichotomies (Western–Eastern, industrial–post-industrial)? How does the medium in which the painting is formed correspond to the concepts of representing different realities? What is individual in the image/painting, and what is symbolic or universal?
The exhibition “Between” by Kristaps Priede explores the boundaries of painting and its capacity to reflect on reality, cultural constructs, and human experience within contemporary space. Created in Leipzig—a city historically positioned between East and West, between industrial and post-industrial identities—the works inhabit a symbolic in-between state, examining how images are constructed, deconstructed, and redefined through form and context.
Comprising twelve works—four paintings, four puzzles, and four smaller studies—the exhibition reimagines the relationship between architecture, memory, and perception. The large-scale paintings depict Bauhaus and industrial architecture, such as Neues Meisterhaus Gropius, Haus am Horn, Spinnerei Chimney, and Spinnerei Clock House. Each image stages a moment of quiet contemplation: a solitary figure engages with monumental structures and vast spaces, evoking the psychological depth and reflective solitude found in the works of Edward Hopper, René Magritte, Caspar David Friedrich, and Edvard Munch.
In the puzzle series, these original compositions are visually deconstructed—fragments from one painting infiltrate another, dissolving clear boundaries between place, time, and meaning. The interplay of Bauhaus geometry and industrial form becomes a visual metaphor for transition and reconstruction, suggesting that painting itself is a site where multiple realities coexist and merge.
The smaller works extend this inquiry, focusing on environment and architectural detail. Here, the image functions not merely as representation but as process—an evolving structure of perception that oscillates between the individual and the universal.
“Between” reflects on painting as both medium and concept: what remains personal and what becomes collective; what endures and what is transformed. Each work exists in a state of tension and reflection—between image and reality, solitude and structure, past and present.
