The Best Shows to See During ‘Various Others’

‘Transferring Domain’ | Nir Altman | 6 September – 19 October

For this year’s Various Others, Munich mainstay Nir Altman is hosting a group exhibition organized by London’s Gathering, one of the more exciting galleries to appear on the UK art scene since the COVID-19 pandemic. The show brings together works by established names Jenny Holzer and Berlinde De Bruyckere with those by emerging artists James Lewis and Emanuel de Carvalho. De Carvalho mounted his first solo with Gathering earlier this year, an exhibition that paired dark photorealistic paintings with imposing sculpture to conjure a dreamy atmosphere meant to challenge perception. Influenced by recent developments in neurology, his works complement De Bruyckere’s moody figurative pieces, Holzer’s own neural practice and the sculptures of his contemporary Lewis, which often combine biological motifs – flowers, bodies – with the inorganic stuff of office furniture.

Maria VMier | Museum Brandhorst | 3 September – 15 September 

Lily van der Stokker | Museum Brandhorst | 7 September – 15 March 2025

Two new commissions open this week at Museum Brandhorst. Inside the institution, Maria VMier’s ‘no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin’ offers an erotic, sumptuous, collaborative intervention in the museum’s Cy Twombly Gallery, devoted to his 2008 series ‘Untitled (Roses)’. This project, which brings together texts and objects, is centred around a tent-like structure created by the artist Evelyn Sitter. Lasting only two weeks, ‘no: tongue’ addresses a local artist scene that can often feel excluded from Munich’s storied museums. Outside, on poles normally reserved for advertising, Lily van der Stokker, an artist well-known for her fascination with language, has mounted flags printed with sans-serif lists of words (‘headache, belly cramps, garbage bag, vacuum cleaner, sweeper …’) related to pharmacies, household objects, sickness and insults – a brilliant yet understated re-weirding of common expressions. 

Georg Haberler | Jo van de Loo | 7 September – 25 October

Playful and kiddish, Georg Haberler’s mixed-media paintings often depict animals and human figures – some familiar, others seemingly invented – still lifes and imagined spaces that are redolent of children’s drawings. These colourful works disarm with a humour that is sometimes difficult to parse. Here, human arms stretch across the canvas (Just Receiving, all works 2024) and giant, sandalled feet step between tiny dancing nudes (Saline). Haberler’s imagery seems to have been drawn from adolescence, with a surprising technical and compositional complexity that emerges upon closer observation.

Teresa Kutala Firmino | Galerie Nagel Draxler | 6 September – 7 December

Based in Johannesburg, Teresa Kutala Firmino is an artist working across multiple media, though she is perhaps best known for her collaged paintings. There can be a deceptive simplicity to her wall-based works, usually complicated by their tone – traditional masks appear alongside cut-outs of models, contorted nudes, flowers and advertisement texts – which is at once sly and knowing. The contested art histories of multiple continents, from Africa to Europe to North America, weave together in these works. Firmino’s female sitters are often shown reluctant in the embrace of men or in the throes of domestic labour. Satirizing the cheerful aesthetics of 1950s contraceptive posters and commercialized love potions, these new works depict the resilience and survival strategies of Black femmehood.

Sheila Hicks and Katinka Bock | Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle and Meyer Riegger | 7 September – 16 November

New works by Sheila Hicks are always a reason to celebrate, especially when smartly curated alongside sculptural pieces by an artist who shares her sense of precision and balance: in this case, the Paris- and Berlin-based Katinka Bock. The important material differences between these two artists – Bock generally works in harder, stiffer stuff, such as wood and ceramics (e.g. Mount Palomar, 2023), while Hicks often uses fabrics (e.g. Meeting on the staircase 1, 2023) – is generative and engrossing; I find myself wishing more galleries offered pairings like this, in which expectations are subverted rather than met.

‘Art and Literature’ | Galerie Klüser | 6 September – 9 November

This group show brings together a wide range of artists who have been inspired by the written word, from Joseph Beuys to Sean Scully. Importantly, the exhibition  is not strictly interested in artists who have painted words on canvas, but in those who have investigated literary models more deeply – from the novel to the epic poem – and the manner in which the art of writing, always a sleepless and troubled mental endeavour, has influenced and changed the art of painting. Of course, Beuys is especially compelling here, but so is Julião Sarmento, whose drawings and paintings are tinged with the novelistic, suggesting greater narratives than a canvas can usually contain.

_{Main image: Georg Haberler, Just Receiving, 2024, acrylic ink and sewing thread on linen, 80 × 60 × 3.5 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Jo van de Loo; photograph: Maximilian Rossner}