Bond Fenster presents Esch | Kähler, a joint exhibition by German artists Matthias Esch and Martin Kähler. For the occasion, the two artists will develop a site-specific, process-led installation that brings together Esch’s paintings and Kähler’s sculptural works. The exhibition starts from a long-standing affinity between them, a family resemblance in artistic temperament and themes. Their connection has grown through exchanges within and beyond the art world, drawing at times on the language of counterculture and forms of dissent.
 
Esch and Kähler meet around a structural question: how does a whole hold together? In philosophy, this is the territory of mereology, the study of the relationship between wholes and their parts. In politics, it is the old problem of authority. Here, the matter is more physical than abstract. In both practices, the whole is not staged as a solid, static unit, but as a vulnerable arrangement kept in motion by the very parts that might unsettle it. In Esch’s paintings, geometric order is continuously interrupted, cracked or short-circuited. Systems appear only to be disturbed from within; grids misbehave, patterns falter and the image seems to test the limits of its own coherence. Kähler’s sculptures, made from materials found on construction sites, follow a related logic. His assemblies often look effortless, yet their integrity depends on elements bent, wedged or locked into place under considerable pressure. Instability negotiating possibility. How much tension can a whole take? Where, then, is the breaking point?
 
Matthias Esch (b. 1988, Andernach, DE) is a Berlin-based painter and video artist. He completed a Master of Visual Arts at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Berlin, in 2016, followed by a Master of Letters from the Glasgow School of Art in 2018. His first monograph, Banality of Structure, was published in 2021. In 2024, he presented his second institutional solo exhibition at Kunstverein Brandenburg, Potsdam.
Martin Kähler (b. 1987, Heidelberg, DE) is a sculptor and installation artist living in Frankfurt am Main. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, where he graduated in 2016. In 2014, he received the Rietveld Academy Fine Arts Award. In 2023, his work was presented at Kunstverein Nürtingen.

 
Opening hours
Saturday, August 29 / 6-10 pm
Sunday, August 30 / 3-7 pm
 
Artist talk
Sunday, August 30 / 4 pm
moderated by curator and gallery director Marta Cassina
in German