Matthias Lahme - Love
27 April—8 June 2019
Opening: Thursday, 25 April, 6–9 pm

After Love Party: DJ Lucas Croon
Spiel- & Billardhalle, Leipziger Str. 58, 10117 Berlin
10 pm

In 2003 Matthias Lahme designed the cover art for Little Annie and the Legally Jammin’ (ITA035) for ITALIC. This work can be taken as a starting point. A lucid, monochrome arrangement of dappled shades brown that does not negate the gestural, but does not emphasize it either. His painting is delicate and light, the watercolors seem thrown down. Harmonious major clusters with a minor impact, contemplative meditations. Matthias Lahme works with a light hand. His papercuts flutter weightlessly in the wind: painterly drawings, fragile two-dimensional sculptures. The silhouettes are enchanting, somewhere between Lotte Reiniger, stained glass windows, and Lyonel Feininger — perhaps in his Kinder-Kids period. A fairytale charm: that is, he does not deny the dark undertone, meandering silhouettes that, in their wandering, frame the light, the cutout, and in the process make the dark, themselves, the subject. Three people are eating cake with red wine at the table. But take a step back, and you can see the deep glint in the black of the wolf’s eyes.

Matthias Lahme is showing two new portrait-format papercuts measuring 243 x 114 cm and 237 x 114 cm at ITALIC. They are untitled, but are undoubtedly children of love. He has named his exhibition Love. And when he talks about love, that‘s exactly what he means. Love, in all its unfathomably. Love, with all its overtones and undertones. Lahme maintains an ambivalent comprehensibility. The ambiguity is always visible. Accessible even in abstraction. The seemingly playful, casual pattern of his works is interwoven with a certain rigor. The path to the lightness of expression shown is not straightforward. Play as work is work. One can really sense the effort of the delicate craft of cutting, but Matthias Lahme is not interested in a display of sweat. He clears the space in favor of a nonchalant, romantic infatuation.

Text: Andreas Reihse

Matthias Lahme, Love, Installation view, 2019, Italic Berlin

Untitled, 2019, Paper cut, Watercolor and Ink on paper, 243 x 114 cm

Untitled, 2019, Paper cut, Watercolor and Ink on paper, 237 x 114 cm