BERLIN.- Esther Schipper Berlin is presenting Winter 2026, bringing together works by Saâdane Afif, Rosa Barba, Angela Bulloch, Julius von Bismarck, Martin Boyce, Etienne Chambaud, Thomas Demand, Ryan Gander, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Ann Veronica Janssens, Lee Bae, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala, and Anicka Yi.

Over four decades ago, Gil Scott-Heron observed that – “politically, and philosophically, and psychologically” – there was only one prevailing season, “the season of ice”; words that, without doubt, mirror the current atmosphere. While the winter solstice promises the gradual return of light, days remain swayed in darkness for weeks on end. Though tiresome, this long night opens a space for introspection, even spurs the fire in one’s belly. Winter, for Scott-Heron, signified a state of frozen aspiration and inspiration. Yet this bitter condition provoked a moody, by now iconic, song that he liked to perform seasoned with a grain of salt. In this vein, and uncovering the creative underbelly of such chilled times, the works on view navigate the uncanny and the cosmic across decades, centuries, even millennials. They draw on a fossilized, charred, or blurred past and envision smart, weird, or weirdly rosy nurseries of the future; their aesthetics converge at a dense point of thick materiality and precise formal execution. Light fractures the exhibition space, transforming it into a chiaroscuro landscape suffused by shadow and spotlight.

The exhibition opens on a vexed double-entendre signaled by the figure of a pyre, at once a relic of wreckage and a promise of renewal. Ryan Gander’s In the very beginning, before words, there were… (2021) consists of black cold-cast bronze forms reminiscent of rocks and logs; these scorched elements conjure both ruination and the birthplace of a phoenix. The sculpture is backed by Julius von Bismarck's The Day the Ocean Turned Black (2025) that captures the Pacific Ocean darkened to near black after airborne ash settled into and stained the water in the wake of the January 2025 Southern Californian wildfires. Taking the second eruption of Mount Vesuvius 79 AD as a sonic point of departure, Anri Sala’s Body Double in the Doldrums (2025) reaches further into the past, dusting off the ashes of ancient times. Suspended from the ceiling in the main exhibition hall, the work consists of a snare drum with built-in speakers that fill the gallery with eerie rumbles. Hovering between lament and warning, the soundscape is unsettling, consoling, and timelessly melancholic. Stretched along an entire wall of the exhibition space, Martin Boyce’s Spook School (2016) documents the interior of the Glasgow School of Art following a fire, prior to a second blaze that would devastate the restored building. In retrospect, the work reads as quietly haunted, anticipating the scale of the subsequent destruction.

Sidestepping any narrative arc, Lee Bae’s Issu Du Feu 1g (2000-2025) stylizes raw materiality: hundreds of small, grafted and polished chards of charcoal are aligned across the panel. The surface shows wood grain and growth rings made by nature and time, refracting light in various directions and in multiple angles. The hypnotizing shimmer of light, collected and cut, too, is crux of the matter in Ann Veronica Janssens’ Atlantic (2020-23). The sculpture consists of nine hammered glass panels reflecting light at different angles and thus creating an effect akin to the effect of daylight on a large body of water. Étienne Chambaud’s Globe (2021) series encases everyday objects in molten glass, at once preserving and destroying them. His sculpture Model for Afar (Regensburg, 5 November 333 BCE) (2021) responds to historical meteorological data through shifting illumination – and circles back into the ancient timeline sounded by Sala’s sculpture.

Like a recurring thought or ill omen jettisoned by the ceaseless stream of consciousness, Rosa Barba’s Footnote (...my distance from the object...) (2021) remains trapped in mimetic repetition: a back-lit handwritten text fragment exposed on 70mm film is ensnared into an endless loop. Angela Bulloch’s Night Sky: Capricorn Into Aquarius (2025), contrastingly, bespeaks the tranquil anticipation of an epochal shift. Using a program that maps the positions of the stars in a 3D virtual model of the universe, Bulloch pictured an existing area of the sky in a displaced perspective, rendering the resulting image a representation foreclosed from Earth. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Untitled (1987/2015) remains tethered to the gravitational pull below stellar constellations. Characteristic of her continuous play with temporal displacements, the work figures the survival-turned-picnic-blanket as a space for leisure, appealing to the urgent need for recreation.

Gonzalez-Foerster’s work is animated by the kaleidoscopic reflections of Philippe Parreno’s The Crawler (2024). Parreno’s work takes inspiration from one of the first robots designed to study the brain’s electrical activity. Moving up and down its track at varying speed, its bulbs flash randomly; Parreno’s luminous crawler generates endless new configurations. Placed in proximity, Pierre Huyghe’s Mind’s Eye (F) (2021) is a sculptural work composed of an aggregate of synthetic and biological material, including micro-organisms. In its sheer materiality, the sculpture – suggestive of living organisms of symbolic familiarity (animal, oyster, organ, alien) – is alive; Huyghe defamiliarizes the familiar. The work originates in Huyghe’s UUmwelt project, borne by a brain-computer interface that filtered “mental images” from a sequence of morphing images in real time. Anicka Yi’s LKñL§RHR†ßñ§ (2023) is a painting produced in collaboration with an algorithm fashioned and fed by the artist. Yi lured this algorithm into an exploration of the visual study of the aquatic, fungal, and microbial forms idiosyncratic to her oeuvre.

Such untamable variety is juxtaposed by Thomas Demand’s Nursery (2020), depicting small plants neatly arranged on long tables; overhanging lights die the scene in a somewhat theatrical pink. The photograph stages the hydroponic laboratory at Niagara College in Ontario, at the time leading the commercial cannabis production worldwide. While the controlled cultivation of cannabis speaks of an economy in which time equals money, consuming such crops escapes any temporal order: now, time is warped, lost, wasted. Portraying the timeliness of fashion in the face of unceasing consumption, Saâdane Afif’s Old Shop-Vac Wet / Dry (2025) is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Jeff Koons. As Afif painstakingly skimmed American suburbs for outdated hoovers, he displaced the ready-made performance of conceptual art’s self-referential (vacuum-sealed yet dusty) orbit, piercing the carousel harnessed to the arts of mechanical reproduction. Sojourner Truth Parson’s Alone with tree II (2025), on the other hand, appears to suspend time altogether. Interspersed by a virtually Kleinian blue, the painting depicts a tree stretching its leafless branches towards a starless sky. The scene’s initial tristesse gives way to moving stillness, a transportive force hovering in-between introspection, desire, fantasy, or, straightforwardly speaking, the untimely longing for change.