Benedikt Gahl: Lieder
Duane Thomas Gallery, New York
December 13, 2025 – January 20, 2026 • Tribeca
Duane Thomas Gallery is pleased to present Lieder, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Munich-based artist Benedikt Gahl (b. 1977, Germany). This exhibition—Gahl’s first major presentation with the gallery—introduces a distilled body of work imbued with psychological immediacy and symbolic clarity.
Trained at the Kunstakademie München under Markus Oehlen, Gahl’s work stands in contrast to German neo expressionism and the Neue Wilde. In his paintings Gahl turns toward reduction, atmosphere, and the quiet force of archetypal imagery. His pared-down iconography—houses, trees, faces, boxes and flames—operates in a psychological and dreamlike register, at times closer in spirit to David Lynch’s use of subconscious cues. These motifs do not narrate; they surface like recollections or premonitions, hovering between the primordial and the immediate.
Central to this new body of work is Gahl’s evolving palette: a restrained yet sensual constellation of ochres, greys, olive greens, and washed pinks. His colors oscillate between the seductive and the sober—warm without sentimentality, muted without retreat. The palette lends the paintings a psychological temperature, a quiet intensity that anchors the symbolic forms and brings them closer to the emotional register of memory. Each canvas feels measured, deliberate, and strangely intimate, as if the colors themselves were chosen for their capacity to hold experience without theatrics.
Gahl’s recent works also evoke the late clarity of Georges Braque, whose pared-down shapes approached a kind of sculptural stillness, as well as the Etruscan sensibility that informed Braque’s thinking: the belief that an outline, when fully inhabited, can carry the weight of an entire worldview. In Gahl’s hands, the contour becomes the carrier of essence—a structure into which emotion, recollection, and instinct are quietly poured.
This attention to what is essential aligns with Alberto Giacometti’s famous assertion that, in a fire, he would save a cat before a work of art. Giacometti’s preference for the living spark over the art object parallels Gahl’s own orientation: his paintings seek not to preserve an image but to capture its life. They operate in the zone where form becomes urgent—where a symbol retains the immediacy of a real encounter.
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