DSSELDORF .- The paintings and drawings of Aneta Kajzer and Ilse Henin come together in face to face, an exhibition that places two artists from different generations in an unexpectedly close conversation. Opening September 4 and running through October 24, 2026, the show explores a shared fascination with transformation, nature and the increasingly fluid boundaries between human, animal and landscape.
Despite the differences in their backgrounds and approaches, Kajzer and Henin create worlds in which identities rarely remain fixed. Bodies appear to merge with landscapes, organic forms suggest animals or faces, and figures seem to emerge only to dissolve again. Their works invite viewers into spaces where memory, imagination and lived experience overlap, and where distinctions between species and environments become less certain.
For Aneta Kajzer, born in Katowice, Poland, in 1989, painting develops through an intuitive and highly responsive process. Her canvases often hover between abstraction and figuration, allowing forms to shift depending on how they are seen. A patch of color might suggest a landscape at first, then a face, an animal or an atmospheric event.
That sense of instability is central to her work. Rather than guiding the viewer toward a single interpretation, Kajzer leaves her images deliberately open. Color plays an important role in that ambiguity, functioning not simply as a formal device but as a carrier of mood and narrative.
In works such as In the Atmosphere from 2026, figures and environments seem to move in and out of one another. Landscapes can become bodies, while bodies appear to dissolve into weather or color. The result is a dreamlike world that feels both recognizable and strange.
Kajzer has emerged as a notable voice in contemporary painting in Germany. She gained wider attention through her participation in JETZT! Junge Malerei in Deutschland in 2019 and 2020 and has received several awards, including a Stiftung Kunstfonds working grant, the Marianne Defet Painting Scholarship and the Kallmann Prize. Her work is represented in public collections including the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz and FRAC Auvergne in France.
Ilse Henin, born in Bad Godesberg in 1944, approaches many of the exhibition’s themes from a very different historical perspective. After studying at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts under Horst Egon Kalinowski from 1966 to 1970, she developed a distinctive visual language shaped by drawing, symbolism and an acute awareness of social and political change.
Her artistic outlook was influenced by her childhood on a farm, extended stays in southern France and the political movements that reshaped Europe during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Feminism, environmental activism, the peace movement and the student protests of the period all formed part of the cultural landscape in which she worked.
Yet Henin rarely addressed those concerns through straightforward political imagery. Instead, she created a poetic universe in which humans, animals and hybrid beings coexist on equal terms. Species boundaries become unstable, and transformation and interdependence emerge as recurring ideas.
Seen today, those concerns can feel strikingly current. Henin’s work anticipated many of the questions now associated with ecological responsibility, feminism and posthumanist thinking, particularly the idea that human life cannot be understood separately from the larger natural systems surrounding it.
Drawing remains at the center of her practice. Using economical and precise lines, Henin builds complex compositions that can feel simultaneously intimate and expansive. Color often enters as an atmospheric or emotional element, while the openness of her forms leaves room for multiple readings.
Although Henin worked consistently for decades, her art remained relatively removed from mainstream art-historical attention for much of her career. That has begun to change. The 2023 exhibition Die unhintergehbare Verflechtung aller Leben at Kunsthalle Dsseldorf helped bring renewed attention to the relevance of her work and its relationship to contemporary conversations about climate, feminism and social change.
Bringing Kajzer and Henin together highlights how artists separated by more than four decades can arrive at remarkably connected questions. One approaches them through the fluid language of contemporary painting, the other through a practice rooted in the political and ecological consciousness of the 1970s.
In face to face, those differences become part of the exhibition’s strength. Rather than presenting a simple comparison between generations, the show suggests a longer continuity of artistic thinking about what it means to live among other beings—and how art can imagine a world in which the boundaries between people, animals and nature are far less fixed than they appear.
face to face: Aneta Kajzer & Ilse Henin opens September 4, 2026, with an opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. The exhibition continues through October 24.
