Kosmos | Otto Piene - Christine Jackob-Marks
- Christine Jackob-Marks
- Otto Piene
About the exhibition
With the major exhibition “KOSMOS,” the Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery is dedicating a joint presentation to two outstanding artistic personalities who bring the theme of the cosmos to life in highly diverse yet resonant forms of expression: ZERO co-founder Otto Piene (1928–2014) and Berlin painter Christine Jackob-Marks (born 1943) .
In the light-flooded Main Hall, an impressive panorama of around 40 works—large-format canvases, works on paper, and fine ink drawings—unfolds, drawing visitors into a dialogue of energy, memory, and inner movement.
Otto Piene – The Cosmos as Living Energy
Upon entering the first hall, the space itself seems to breathe. Otto Piene's luminous, floating compositions fill the hall with a vibrant presence – fire, smoke, light, and color merge into a visual stream. Works such as Black Spider (1994), Antigravity (1997), Fire and Ice X (2001), and Magma (2006/07) reveal the characteristic tension between control and unleashing, order and explosion that makes Piene's art so unique.
Piene, one of the founding fathers of the ZERO group, understood the cosmos as a living order, as the “breath of light.” His images are not created with a brush, but through processes—heat, smoke, air, movement. One senses the energy of the fire that was drawn across the canvas, the rhythm of the expanding form, the pulsation of light that seems to rise from the material itself.
With this show, the gallery continues its long-standing engagement with Piene's work: following the major retrospective “Otto Piene – Light, Energy, Cosmos” and the later exhibition “Piene & Fontana,” which focused on the dialogue between light and space, this is the third major Piene presentation in the last ten years.
In KOSMOS, his late work is presented as the legacy of an artist who understood the sky as his studio—an art that makes the invisible visible and the fleeting permanent.
Christine Jackob-Marks – Cosmos and Memory
In the adjoining hall, another quietly vibrant world opens up. Christine Jackob-Marks' works envelop visitors in an atmosphere of silence and depth. One enters a space of memory—a colorful silence that is both moving and contemplative.
Her paintings, created in Berlin since the 1980s, mediate between external perception and inner experience. Since the 2000s, early expressive gestures have given way to a sensitive, gestural abstraction in which color, light, and movement communicate directly with one another.
Jackob-Marks, who won first prize in the competition for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in 1994 together with a team, has been working on an artistic concept of memory for decades. Her paintings are not illustrations, but resonance chambers. In them, we encounter a form of painting that does not show, but allows us to feel: the flow of time, the layering of memory, the illumination of inner landscapes.
Christine Jackob-Marks also looks back on a long tradition with the Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery, which began in the 1990s with her first exhibitions in Bielefeld and at international art fairs. Her current work thus has a long-standing connection to our gallery program, which has accompanied and promoted her artistic development over decades.
In his more recent works—such as Priele (2023), Eiszeit (I) (2023), and Hurrikan (2024)—water, earth, light, and darkness seem to merge in a quiet movement. One stands before surfaces that breathe. The light does not come from outside, but seems to glow from the depths of the canvas. In the new works on paper from 2025, this process is condensed into pure gesture, into an almost graphic meditation on creation and decay.
Thus, the tour through her rooms also leads through layers of memory and perception – to the point where painting becomes consciousness.
Two artistic universes – one shared breath
The encounter between these two bodies of work creates a tension that carries the visitor from Piene's physical energy to Jackob-Mark's contemplative depth. Both seek the invisible in the medium of painting – that inner glow that connects all being.
Parallel to the “KOSMOS” exhibition, the gallery continues to show selected highlights from the major exhibition “The Weimar Era” in a concentrated form in its expanded premises and on the upper floor. The gallery thus spans an impressive arc from the expressive visions of classical modernism to contemporary explorations of the cosmos as energy, memory, and consciousness.
Information
Opening, Saturday 22. November 2025, 5 pm
