SAENGER Galería is pleased to present German artist Alexander Wertheim for the first time in Mexico. Born in 1995, Wertheim studied at the Berlin University of the Arts with Manfred Pernice and painting Hunter College in New York. Over the course of ten years, he experimented with various painterly concepts, including the production of paper streamers, paintings of tablecloths, and the practice of a hyperrealist style that ultimately evolved into his most characteristic work: spray-painted lines on primed canvases. Central aspect of Wertheim’s paintings is the intersection of vertical and horizontal entities—a principle he deems fundamental to everything. Since his first public appearance in 2022, he has presented five solo exhibitions, including "November Paintings" (Brunnenstraße 22, Berlin, 2022), "Sunsets" (König Galerie, Berlin, 2023), and "January 2024" (ACME art fair with SAENGER Galería, Mexico City, 2024).
For his solo debut during the 11th edition of Salon Acme 2024, Alexander Wertheim has created a new series of works on paper and canvas in which the plots of color, shape, rhythm and density achieved by the crossing of horizontal and vertical lines. It represents a clash of entities that try to build order within chaos, or show the internal battle of a structure against its own disintegration.
This new body of paintings has been made especially in Mexico City taking into account the specific characteristics of the place that will host his exhibition, the Prim Public Project building located at 30 General Prim Street. In that same logic and continuing his typical line of pictorial research, Wertheim entitled this unpublished body of work “January 2024”, a gesture with which the artist situates his practice in the two temporal and spatial axes in which all existence occurs. With his paintings, where lines irregular in length, thickness and intensity interconnect with others generating connections, knots and crossings similar to those that occur in a canvas, Alexander Wertheim addresses the potential of errors and coincidences, the relationship between planning and spontaneity and, in his words , “the indelible and the factual. I work with the amount of risk involved in leaving a physical footprint. “It thrilles me to physically interact with my surroundings.”
