Mothertongue: Harm Gerdes’ Greek debut at Kalfayan Gallery
Harm Gerdes Debuts in Athens with Mothertongue at Kalfayan Gallery
Kalfayan Gallery proudly presents Mothertongue, the first solo exhibition in Greece by German-Greek Cypriot artist Harm Gerdes (b. 1994, Darmstadt). The exhibition opens on Thursday, May 8, 2025, from 18:00 to 21:00, marking a significant milestone for the artist, who has lived and worked in Athens since 2022.
A graduate of the renowned Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, Gerdes belongs to a new generation of painters redefining abstraction with a bold, contemporary lens. Mothertongue — his fifth solo exhibition overall — is both a meditation on identity and a declaration of artistic autonomy. While the title alludes to the intimacy of native language, it more deeply references his primary expressive language: painting.
To experience Gerdes’ work in person is to witness the transformation of surface and medium. What might appear digital or screen-born from afar is, in fact, a masterfully layered orchestration of pigment and form. Fluorescent hues, fluid contours, and textured surfaces pulse with life, moving between material immediacy and optical illusion. Each canvas resists easy categorization, eschewing narrative in favor of sensorial and emotional resonance.
With Mothertongue, Gerdes enters a new creative phase, unshackled from the need to reference or rationalize. His approach is intuitive yet rigorous, allowing form, color, and composition to emerge organically from the act of painting itself. In doing so, he engages timeless concerns of the medium — structure and collapse, rhythm and interruption, tension and harmony — while embedding his works firmly in the visual vocabulary of the present.
Subtle traces of Athens are embedded in these compositions. Since relocating to the city in late 2022, Gerdes has absorbed the stark light, earthy palettes, and fragmented geometry of both its natural and urban landscapes. One might glimpse the washed-out white of a Cycladic summer or the dense layering of Athenian street grids in his abstracted visual language.
There is joy here, too — a visual exuberance that recalls the thrill of hearing one’s native tongue spoken in an unfamiliar place. Gerdes’ canvases evoke the comfort of recognition and the excitement of discovery, offering viewers the pleasure of inhabiting spaces that are at once strange and familiar. For those navigating multiple identities or geographies, Mothertongue speaks to the richness of in-betweenness — and the unspoken beauty of a language that is deeply felt rather than overtly told.
Find Gerdes at Kalfayan Gallery at 11 Charitos, Athens
