German artist Schirin Kretschmann is currently presenting her largest museum solo exhibition to date at the PEAC Museum in Freiburg, demonstrating how painting can transcend traditional boundaries and showing that aesthetic minimalism is itself an art form. The exhibition, titled "Ten By One," showcases the artist's unique approach to spatial intervention and conceptual painting.
Working from a modest 35-square-meter studio in Berlin's Wedding district, Kretschmann stands in stark contrast to international painters like Mark Bradford or Julie Mehretu, who create mega-works in massive studios. Unlike Anselm Kiefer's former studio complex in France, which spans an area larger than 40 soccer fields, Kretschmann's workspace is intimate – seven steps from desk to door, two steps to the window. In this high-ceilinged room, she develops her works through thought experiments, models, and experiments.
For her PEAC exhibition, Kretschmann has threaded a dark gray, approximately 100-meter-long strap at a height of two meters through all ten museum rooms, including the anteroom. Using a massive ratchet, she places the strap under tension, effectively binding or embracing the entire institution. This central work gives both the piece and the exhibition its name: "Ten By One." According to Kretschmann, because "everything is painting" in this museum, her careful yet uncompromising intervention works excellently.
The artist achieves significant impact with minimal means, particularly because everything relates to the history of radical painting collected at PEAC. This movement has long torn down the boundaries once set by classical methods, color palettes, brushes, and picture frames. Kretschmann finds the aesthetic core, freed from the pictorial, throughout the entire movement space. The colored foam cushions that absorb the pressure of the strap on door frames can be painterly impulses, just as much as the gray-black, cut dirt-catching mats of "Exit," which also play with the idea of trace collection.
The exhibition includes "Scores," a ten-part sound installation featuring small black speaker points in five of the ten spacious white rooms. These installations let possible acoustic backdrops from museum closing times or renovation phases resonate – sounds that usually have nothing to do with art and are even kept away from it. In the almost shocking tidiness of Kretschmann's exhibition, the audience becomes collaborators and somehow also a swarm of color dots. The sound takes over the function that a painting by Agnes Martin, collected at PEAC, would normally have: that of aesthetic marking.
Such expanded conceptual fields of painting have been developing for Kretschmann for about two decades. In 2008, she realized the work "Bing" in China with melting, green-sprayed ice blocks, where the physical dissolution process became the painter. As the ice melted, green patterns formed on the ground. It's a captivating combination of Fluxus, Happening, and painting that Kretschmann has congenially varied several times in Leipzig, Cologne, and Basel.
In 2017, she distributed a blue pigment-plaster mixture on the earth for the group exhibition "Made in Germany" at Kunstverein Hannover. Later, she created "Form on the Day" from a similar powder. For these serial work series, she sieves the pigment onto a glass pane and places another pane on top, much like one would place a rarely beautiful plant leaf between two book pages. With Kretschmann, it's preservation and exhibition simultaneously, as one can look through the glass and even sense spatiality.
For "Let's Slip Into Her Shoes (III)," purchased by the Stuttgart Art Museum, she mixed dark leather grease with paint and applied it in rectangles of different sizes in the stairwell, precisely between the Otto Dix and Dieter Roth rooms. The grease penetrates the walls, structuring a color pattern. The work can remain forever, or just a few years – it's a matter of discretion. Kretschmann exhibits her work as a process, or conversely, the process becomes a quasi-object.
Three landmark points mark the development of her displays. In "Elf Schlittenhunde" (2008) at her home academy in Karlsruhe, she let part of the exhibition space collapse, layering it into a sculpture reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's "The Sea of Ice." For "Michael Jackson" (2010), also in Karlsruhe, visitors immediately entered the work upon entering the room: white traces of ceiling painting on black plastic sheets, though it wasn't about the pop star who died the previous year, but about the artistic methods of Michael Asher and Jackson Pollock.
The idea that a painting is a window to the world was strongly questioned in the 20th century and exposed as a dull illusion. Famous art critic Clement Greenberg countered this with flatness – the flat but real materiality of image and carrier. Artist Mark Rothko added the suggestive infinity of painted color. Theorist Norman Bryson later dissected the symbolic nature of all elements in his eye-opening book "Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze." Kretschmann operates her performative space-penetration strategy with these and other ideas.
The artist has talent for the underlying, structural analyses, and management. She was entrusted with curating "Ten By One" herself, as she knows PEAC well from previous exhibitions there. Moreover, self-design harmonizes with her working method, where it's not so much about arranging existing objects but about redefining spatiality. Her Munich professorship since 2020 naturally cannot be managed without organizational talent either.
Currently, she's involved in redesigning the Leverkusen Morsbroich ensemble, responsible for "Arriving, Parking, Transitions." She's built a model that stands on her desk in her Berlin studio, showing miniature trees and cars in front of stepped terrain. "I want to rethink the in-between," she explains – the sculptural encounter of the city of Leverkusen with the Rococo castle that has housed the local Museum of Modern Art since 1951.
Her designs for adjacent bus stops – colorful and matte transparent panels standing in the landscape – are reminiscent from afar of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, who "transposed color into the third dimension," as described by former New York Times critic Roberta Smith. Oiticica is one of Kretschmann's art historical reference points, whom she analyzes in her doctoral dissertation.
Kretschmann is a reserved person who radiates nothing professorial, and whose artistic extravagance, it quickly becomes clear, seems to be primarily calmness and taking time. Her eyes are such a light blue they could come from one of her pigment works or from a luminous garment by Baroque painter Bernardo Cavallino. This brings to mind a sentence by art connoisseur Max J. Friedländer, who helped build Berlin's museums around 1900: "Seeing is an actively spiritual function, not a passively physical one."
This seeing as doing fits Kretschmann. She doesn't need pure viewing museums or exhibitions of visual consumption. She wants to conquer spaces, turn them upside down, reveal with aesthetic strategies, and probably also enchant a little. Sometimes painterly, sometimes performative and installation-based, always site-specific. She exhibits at the place, for the place, with the place.
"Ten By One" also includes 800 shimmering green marbles that the artist collected while walking in Porto, where they gathered dust in a warehouse. Now they find their actual purpose in Freiburg in the performative work "Walking," which involves the audience. The robot vacuum cleaner of "We Are The Robots" also takes viewers on a strange journey: during closing hours, it moves through PEAC's exhibition rooms with a ceiling-directed camera, with images transmitted to a screen embedded in the floor. By looking down, one actually looks up.
For Kretschmann, it's also a social and political stance to work as much as possible with what's available on site, with the lowest possible budget. Not always growing upward – more studio space, more employees, more exhibitions, more space – but sinking into depth. Not material-intensive, but time-intensive. Today, one can call this almost anti-capitalistic; in any case, it's subversive.
Kretschmann's art shows that in art, frugality is not the opposite of opulence. Her PEAC exhibition conveys three key insights: artistic frugality isn't the opposite of opulence, one should rent a small studio and take time, and the most valuable artistic technique remains imagination. The exhibition runs until February 8, 2026, at the Paul Ege Art Collection in Freiburg.
