A programme built through artists and relationships

Current · Solo exhibition · Berlin

Jonathan Niclaus — We Will Always Have What We Never Had

9.10.2026 – 31.10.2026 · Opening Friday 9.10.2026, 18:00 – 22:00

VRB is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by artist Jonathan Niclaus.

Niclaus became interested in the space where landscape ceases to be a place. His work explores the world as a process - a world in which nothing is permanent, finished, or unambiguous. Painting is not understood as a representation of this world, but as part of it. Colour, material, and time become agents of the same transformation that shapes landscapes, bodies, and memories.

Featured artist: Jonathan Niclaus

Group exhibition · Berlin

Among old and new Friends

9.09.2026 – 12.09.2026

Among old and new Friends brings together artists whose practices have crossed the gallery's path at different moments, through exhibitions, conversations, friendships and encounters.

Conceived for Berlin Art Week, the exhibition deliberately resists a single curatorial thesis. Instead, it invites visitors to encounter each artist on their own terms and to move between distinct artistic worlds, perspectives and ways of working.

Presented in the intimate setting of the VRB Showroom, works are brought into close proximity without being asked to explain one another. Connections are allowed to emerge naturally, through unexpected visual correspondences, contrasts and conversations between works.

The exhibition reflects an idea at the heart of VRB: that a gallery is shaped not only by its programme, but by the relationships that develop around it over time. Among old and new Friends brings some of these relationships together, familiar positions alongside new encounters, and opens them up to friends, collectors and visitors for Berlin Art Week. It is less a statement than a snapshot: a temporary constellation of artists we admire.

Featured artists: Lucas Dupuy, Lena Emrich, Isabella Fuernkas, Vitali Gelwich, Lewinale Havette, Arthur Laidlaw, Jonathan Niclaus, Maximilian Rödel, Marco Siciliano

Solo exhibition · Berlin

Playing with Fire

November 8, 2025 – February 25, 2026

Von Racknitz + Baer Gallery is pleased to present Playing with Fire, the inaugural solo exhibition of recent paintings by Lewinale Havette in Berlin, in partnership with Palo Gallery New York.

Lewinale Havette's inaugural Berlin exhibition features eight paintings and eight works on paper exploring the body as both medium and message, a field where emotion, memory and power intertwine.

Across cultures, the body has long been seen as more than flesh; it is a vessel, a threshold where power, memory and spirit converge. This exhibition treats the body as such: an active field where desire and dominance, love and violence, are inscribed.

These works traverse a spectrum of human emotions: tenderness and wounding, intimacy and control. Love appears here as a double force capable of binding, sheltering and transforming, yet also of restraining and undoing. It echoes the artist's struggle with those closest to her, where affection was entangled with power and protection with dominance.

Here, fire is not cast only as ruin but as clarifier, an alchemy that refines what persists when form collapses. Each piece becomes a vessel for transformation, carrying ancestral echoes, unyielding memories and the quiet persistence of the spirit.

Featured artist: Lewinale Havette

Two-person exhibition · Berlin

Playing and Reality

March 2025 – May 2025

Von Racknitz + Baer Gallery is pleased to present Playing and Reality, a two-person exhibition by Arthur Laidlaw and Dan Rees.

The show borrows its title directly from Donald Winnicott's 1971 book Playing and Reality. A key figure in psychoanalysis, Winnicott emphasised the importance of play in psychological development, particularly in the formation of a stable and creative self.

Play is not simply an activity for children but a lifelong process that enables growth, imagination and emotional resilience.

What Arthur Laidlaw and Dan Rees attempt to articulate in their own ways is the self-negating nature of images. They do so through an engagement with the mechanical processes familiar to analogue photography; the results are an unexpected and unrepeatable series of nuanced and seductively painted surfaces.

Featured artists: Arthur Laidlaw, Dan Rees

Group exhibition · Berlin

Resonance

November 2024 – February 2025

Resonance marked a pivotal moment for VRB Gallery. It brought together artists the gallery has long supported alongside those with whom it was collaborating for the first time.

As the debut exhibition in the gallery's new Charlottenburg showroom on Clausewitzstraße 2, it symbolised a fresh start and a redefinition of the gallery as it continued to evolve.

Although the artistic approaches of Susi Gelb, Jonathan Niclaus, Gerhard Bär, Bill Billekvist, Bruna Sperling, Sam Cherof and Balzer Balzer may seem very different, their works created a finely tuned play of resonances, a vibrant exchange of ideas, forms and emotions.

Through sculpture, painting, installation and design, the exhibition explored environmental consciousness, personal growth, emotional expression and the evolving relationship between humanity and technology.

Featured artists: Susi Gelb, Jonathan Niclaus, Gerhard Bär, Bill Billekvist, Bruna Sperling, Sam Cherof, Balzer Balzer

Solo exhibition · Vienna

Jonathan Niclaus — From Near and Far

June 2024

Gallery Von Racknitz + Baer presented From Near and Far, an exhibition of new works by Jonathan Niclaus in Vienna.

In this exhibition, Niclaus delves into the exploration of proximity and retreat through an extensive series of textured works. The paintings reflect on the interplay of shadow and light, holding both visible surfaces and their hidden undertones.

Utilising acrylic, oil and graphite on canvas, Niclaus engages in overpainting, a process that embodies both creation and destruction. Beloved elements are sometimes sacrificed to forge new paths on the canvas, underscoring the urge to leave behind the familiar and embrace the unknown.

His paintings play with accident and intent. Spontaneous elements disrupt and enhance planned compositions, and the ongoing dialogue between control and chance mirrors life's unpredictability and the acts of beauty that occasionally arise from it.

Featured artist: Jonathan Niclaus

Solo exhibition · Berlin

Alex de Brabant — On Earth

21.03.2024 – 21.04.2024

For two decades, Alex de Brabant has developed a body of photography that, spanning portraiture and still life, relays the uncanny entwinement of all earthly life.

He began his career specialising in portrait photography across the arts and cultural sector before shifting, after opening his studio in Berlin in 2012, toward a more focused artistic practice.

Through his photography, Alex prompts viewers to reconsider their perceptions and embrace a sense of connection to all living beings. A selected constellation of recent photographs, On Earth casts a dappled light over the complexity and interconnectedness of natural worlds.

Presenting allegorical portraits, imagery of unique ecosystems and still lifes, the works use careful attention to symbolism, composition and an often psychedelic deployment of colour to afford the viewer an experience of nature verging on the numinous.

Featured artist: Alex de Brabant

Solo exhibition · Berlin

Jonathan Niclaus — Dickicht

12.10.2023 – 01.11.2023

Von Racknitz + Baer Gallery welcomed Jonathan Niclaus to the VRB family with his first solo exhibition, Dickicht.

A Dickicht, or thicket, manifests as a dense, intricately woven space that Niclaus comprehends both technically and emotionally. The canvas transforms into a portal: a visual partition, part barricade, part stencil, offering ever-shifting vantages and subsequently obscuring them.

Here, all elements coalesce into a passage through the tangle of wind-swept branches and trunks. Ivory clearings are filtered and refracted by changing transparencies of leaves, while occasional bursts of pure colour disrupt the scene with their stark presence.

There exists no hierarchy here: foliage, fauna, emotions. Both decay and rebirth coexist harmoniously, as if the mythological forest unfolds within crystalline rectangular parcels.

Featured artist: Jonathan Niclaus

Group exhibition · Berlin

Fathers Chariot / THE FALL

23.03.2023 – 06.05.2023

Group exhibition with Clare Barrow, Billie Clarken, Fjorsk, Nadine Lohof, Sally von Rosen and Tim Rosenbaum.

The exhibition brought sculpture, painting, performance residue and installation into a physically charged and theatrically staged environment, moving through collapse, spectacle, devotion and ruin.

It also included work by Nadine Lohof in direct dialogue with her performance Mental Ragout x Bistro Bernstein des Hauses Ehr' ist Gastlichkeit, extending the exhibition into questions of ritual, family memory and material aftermath.

Featured artists: Clare Barrow, Billie Clarken, Fjorsk, Nadine Lohof, Sally von Rosen, Tim Rosenbaum

Solo exhibition · Berlin

Bill Billekvist — INTERNATIONAL TOPLAC PLUS

19.07.2023 – 26.08.2023

Sculptural paintings exploring framing, fabrics, textile details and premium boat varnish above the waterline.

The works occupy a zone between painting and object, foregrounding surface, edge, suspension and display.

Featured artist: Bill Billekvist

Solo exhibition · Berlin

Selassie — The regular Man

March 2023 – May 2023

A first exhibition with the Ghanaian-born artist, reflecting inner conflict, belonging and the search for self-love.

Figures, symbols and repeated gestures move between self-assertion and vulnerability, building a pictorial language of psychic and social negotiation.

Featured artist: Selassie

Solo exhibition · Berlin

Media Esfarjani — How many yards for a garden to play hide and seek?

14.09.2022 – 26.09.2022

A sculptural painting practice that merges hand-applied paint, ornament and wooden structures into playful, irregular compositions.

The exhibition brought together materially hybrid works that shift between image, support and object, holding a sense of improvisation and spatial play.

Featured artist: Media Esfarjani

Solo exhibition · Berlin

Benni Kakert — I can not read

23.10.2022 – 06.11.2022

Benni Kakert's first solo exhibition centered on an oversized tar-coated bunk bed and a dense, emotionally charged spatial environment.

Photography, sculpture and installation converged into a singular scene of intimacy, violence, repetition and theatrical unease.

Featured artist: Benni Kakert

Solo exhibition / residency · Berlin

Bruna Sperling — Different places, same blue.

08.09.2023 – 30.09.2023

The first artist in residence hosted by VRB Gallery in summer 2023, with work shaped by architecture, geometry and vibrant colour.

The exhibition carried a clear dialogue between painting, surface and spatial rhythm, translating travel, memory and formal reduction into a precise painterly register.

Featured artist: Bruna Sperling

Solo exhibition · Berlin

Gerhard Bär — Plastic Waste Lightobjects

23.01.2023 – 06.02.2023

Gerhard Bär works exclusively with plastic waste to create design objects, light installations and art that redefines the way we perceive lavish consumption and confronts us with environmental pollution.

His objects arise like a colourful phoenix from the mountains of waste of industrial society, preserving the composition and historical nature of discarded material while giving it new existence.

The exhibition gathered luminous works that sit between design, sculpture and installation, extending the gallery programme into questions of reuse, material memory and contemporary consumption.

Featured artist: Gerhard Bär