Catherine Sanke, Hüllen und Schatten (Shells and Shadows), 2026, Äste (Branches) group of works. Ceramic installation. Installation view of “M26 – Ausstellung der Meisterschüler*innen der HGB,” WERKSCHAU Halle 12, Spinnerei, Leipzig. The white partition brings the hollow branch forms and their spatial relationships into view. Photo: DOKUNST

I leaned forward until my face was close to the opening of a black fragment of branch. I wanted to see what was inside. The cracked surface had initially suggested wood, perhaps burnt wood; the hollow body unsettled that certainty. Catherine Sanke’s Hüllen und Schatten (Shells and Shadows, 2026) is a ceramic installation. Suspended on fine threads in Hall 12 of Leipzig’s Spinnerei, these forms preserve the appearance of branches while depriving them of their familiar substance. This is more than a successful deception. The work reveals how readily we identify a material before we have actually examined it. My first interpretation, too, had outpaced my looking.

A few steps back, the work changed. The individual bodies became a drawing of overlaps and intervals; moving closer again, I watched that order break into surfaces, broken edges and dark openings. I kept having to adjust my distance. The white wall behind them is an excellent decision in the display. Against the hall’s rough masonry, the branches might too easily have slipped into an atmospheric narrative of decay. The white separates them from their industrial setting, clarifies their contours and makes the distances between them legible as part of the work. It allows what appears to be a fragment of nature to reveal itself as a constructed form.

Sanke’s accompanying text describes fire as a force that binds and fixes form. The wall text distinguishes four groups of works; the suspended branches belong to a broader exploration of shells, touch and interior spaces. What convinces me most here is the tension between bodies that look heavy and their almost weightless arrangement. The transformation of material needs no explanation to unsettle us, yet knowing that the forms are ceramic makes the experience more precise. Craft becomes an instrument of understanding enacted through looking. This makes the work a useful starting point for a question that still shadows Leipzig: what do people mean when they say that artists here still paint “properly”?

Running until 8 October, M26 presents final projects from the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts’ postgraduate Meisterschüler*innen programme for the academic year 2025/26, spanning different disciplines. Approaching such an exhibition with the expectations attached to a city of painters would be mistaken from the outset. Yet those expectations cannot simply be shrugged off. The Leipzig School and the New Leipzig School established a visibility from which the city’s art scene continues to benefit. Turning that history into a seal of quality for a particular kind of image, however, makes it prescriptive. The word “properly” then contains an unspoken judgment on everything that dispenses with canvas, figuration and painterly virtuosity.

The reduction begins with the institution itself. In its own history, the HGB describes how painting came to shape its public image decisively from the late 1960s, while socially engaged photography developed alongside it. Leipzig was already more than its most successful image of itself allowed us to see. Heisig, Mattheuer and Tübke, too, are diminished by the idea of a uniform bastion of craftsmanship standing against international modernism. Their distinct visual languages and relationships to history cannot be reduced to the claim that artists here preserved something that had been lost elsewhere. What troubles me about that claim is less its pride than its convenience. It spares the viewer the work of judgment.

Eva Gräbeldinger’s xoxo your oracle (2026) approaches the problem from another direction. The installation combines objects, prints on paper and fabric, and sound. On the freely suspended, banner-like print, a frontal figure holds the gaze: a body poised between armour, anatomical articulation and a surrounding field traversed by lines. Its surface looks worn in places, as though the image had been subjected to the demands of its own making. The artist explains that she brings dust, fibres, cracks and folds into the process and rejects the optimisation of the print. What I find most persuasive is that the work does not conceal its technical conditions behind a flawless result. It makes the procedure itself available to perception.

But a claim to rebellion is not yet an aesthetic achievement. The visible trace, the accepted mistake and the rejection of perfection can themselves become a dependable style. Gräbeldinger’s work has to be judged at this threshold. Its spatial presentation matters where it changes the conditions of looking: the image occupies a place in the hall rather than settling against a wall. Released from the usual arrangement of image and support, it permits a bodily encounter. The accompanying text’s wider claims about community and empathy are not thereby fulfilled. I consider that gap productive, provided it remains open. A work deserves a serious examination of the distance between its intention and its effect.

In David Schröder’s Škoda (2026), that distance becomes especially tangible. The yellow horse stands on the hall floor without rider or pedestal; an orange ratchet strap encircles its body, and visible seams interrupt the continuity of its form. The wall text identifies a taxidermy form and construction foam. What would ordinarily disappear beneath the skin of a mounted animal emerges here as the figure itself. The strap functions both as a practical device and as an unsettling line drawn around the body. To me, this openly displayed provisional state is stronger than the animal’s vitality invoked by the text. The horse does not need to come alive. Its peculiar presence arises precisely because an industrially manufactured substitute body attracts our expectations of both animal and monument.

The surrounding obelisks, which the artist describes as remnants of building sites, extend the question into the language of monuments. The rider’s absence does not entirely dismantle the monumental order: the horse remains its bearer, only without the person whose power it would normally amplify. This is a persuasive displacement. Yet declaring the work a critique of domination simply because it looks damaged would be too easy. Its interest lies in the relationship between form, supporting function and artificial substance. Schröder exposes the framework of a representation. This gives us more to think about than a premature message about fallen heroes.

The exhibition cannot therefore be judged adequately either as the continuation of a school or as evidence of its supersession. In Sanke, Gräbeldinger and Schröder, the work of shaping form and material remains central; it takes place elsewhere and under different conditions. The bright hall and its white partitions also determine how clearly that work can be perceived. The walls create focused encounters within a space whose historical fabric makes substantial demands on our attention. With the branches, this intervention is particularly precise. We should not hastily infer a unified curatorial thesis: the shared graduation exhibition also derives its value from differences that resist an overarching programme.

And the market? It can reward a recognisable Leipzig image just as readily as the familiarity of an internationally circulating installation language. There is no reason to accuse young artists collectively of conformism; equally, changing medium is no cause in itself for celebrating liberation. When material experiments and political terms merely supply the expected signals of contemporaneity, a new convention emerges. Criticism that grows suspicious at the word “tradition” but forgets its standards at the word “experiment” serves its purpose poorly. What matters remains what a work, through its particular form, enables us to experience and think.

I would neither discourage Leipzig from painting nor oblige its younger artists to break with the past. The works considered here offer good reasons to set aside, for now, the question of the next Leipzig School. Sanke’s hollow branches demand a gaze willing to test its assumptions; Gräbeldinger’s print calls for engagement with the conditions of its making; Schröder’s horse turns the substitute body into the bearer of a contradictory presence. Such decisions require skill and judgment beyond the canvas as well. Leipzig’s legacy comes alive where it equips artists to make them. The moment it dictates what their work should look like, it becomes an obstacle.

Exhibition: M26 – Ausstellung der Meisterschüler*innen der HGB, 25 September–8 October 2026. WERKSCHAU Halle 12, Spinnerei, Spinnereistraße 7, 04179 Leipzig. Tuesday–Saturday, noon–6 pm.

Impressum

Angaben gemäß § 5 TMG:

Esteban Velazquez v. Wilhelm

Badergraben 16 04808 Wurzen

Kontakt:

Verantwortlich für den Inhalt nach § 18 Abs.2 MstV:

+49 15776999372

Esteban Velazquez v. Wilhelm

info@dokunstmag.de

www.dokunstmag.de

Badergraben 16 04808 Wurzen

Datenschutz