October 2025 by Alexander Wertheim

"October 2025" is the first museum exhibition in Mexico by German artist Alexander Wertheim (Germany, 1995). Presented in collaboration with Saenger Galería, the exhibition will be on view at the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro from October 31 of this year through January 2026.

 

Alexander Wertheim's (Germany, 1995) exhibition October 2025 consists of a group of recent paintings that continue the exploration the artist has pursued over the past two years during various residencies in London, Spain, and Berlin. This pictorial investigation is marked by a formal shift with decisive discursive implications. Unlike his previous body of work, in which Wertheim employed enamel paint dispersed with aerosol, he now turns to acrylic paint applied with brushes and paintbrushes. And although both bodies of work maintain a deep correlation through the dialectical system of thought Alexander develops-both in the enamel-and-air works and in the acrylic-and-friction ones-the paintings in October 2025 possess an affective quality that grants his abstract imagery a new coherence and expressive strength.

 

Wertheim achives this unique pictorial exercise through various paths, as the artist himself has stated: "When I began my studies (first at the University of the Arts Berlin and later at Hunter College in New York), I painted color fields, for instance. Until a few years ago, I worked with photorealistic and figurative oil paintings. Then I moved toward gestural abstraction because I wanted to produce something human, something fallible, but also something that couldn't be calculated. For me, the gesture is the epitome of humanity, and pattern is the system in which it is embodied." From this initial and ongoing reflection, Wertheim has developed a statement within contemporary painting using only a few essential elements: immaculate white canvases; grids of horizontal lines superimposed on vertical ones of varying thickness, density, and length; and a restrained chromatic range currently dominated by ochres, mineral greens, and burgundies with violet undertones.

 

With this formal economy, the artist addresses a single, persistent idea: "Everything is reacting with everything else." From a drop accidentally left on the canvas by the friction of the brush in an unexpected spot, to the intention of the hand-which in the final composition corresponds with the quick, energetic stroke that produced it-up to the multiple layers resulting from the encounter of space, light, and time: field, structure, weight, color, sequence, rhythm, and duration. From this variety of informational planes arise infinite relationships among the components and unpredictable solutions on each occasion.In this way, Alexander Wertheim's painting is the never-final result of each experiment. The works presented in the exhibition October 2025 are simultaneously a statement and an understanding of painting: each attempt, in its own way, tests and practices its own record. None resemble one another, yet they are united by a single purpose a continuous experiment on the potential of the physical mark, a study of its factual and spontaneous condition. As the artist himself has remarked: "I think I paint a little differently each month, involving different emotions and ideas in the process, so it's useful to consider each production process separately. They are phases. I conceive this work as a project of continuous experimentation, without final results.

 

- Chrisitian Barragán