Oliver Bak
Swarmers
Indipendenza, Rome
Through January 17, 2026

The exhibition is the outcome of a creative process that combines the artist’s work in Copenhagen with a residency in Italy, which began in Tarquinia at the Matta Archives and concluded at Indipendenza in Rome. During this experience, Oliver Bak created a new series of twelve previously unseen oil and wax on canvas works, presented alongside a selection of drawings, also previously unseen. The exhibition unfolds within the apartment, weaving its way among terrazzo floors, painted ceilings, and period wallpaper.

Songs before Sunrise
Oliver Bak, Eugène Carrière, Guglielmo Castelli, Enzo Cucchi, Enrico David, Leonor Fini, Anne Imhof, Alexej von Jawlensky, Conny Maier, Rosemarie Trockel, Andro Wekua
April 4–May 17, 2025
London

In his poem “Vereinsamt” (1884), Friedrich Nietzsche portrays a bleak winter landscape that can be read as a symbol of existential loneliness and metaphysical longing. The crows caw, the snow looms ominously, and man, feeling uprooted, remains isolated within himself. It is this Symbolist atmosphere that characterises the exhibition Songs before Sunrise at Sprüth Magers’ London gallery. The artists gathered here explore the tension between inner imagination, historical awareness, and the inescapability of our personal perspective on the world. The exhibition brings together works by Oliver Bak, Eugène Carrière, Guglielmo Castelli, Enzo Cucchi, Enrico David, Leonor Fini, Anne Imhof, Alexej von Jawlensky, Conny Maier, Rosemarie Trockel and Andro Wekua. Their works interweave past and present in a dreamlike visual language in which the boundaries between reality and imagination are dissolved.

Oliver Bak
Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist
September 14–November 2, 2024
Berlin

The mystical scenes of painter Oliver Bak unite the spirits of the past and present. Drawing from fiction and the real, mythology and life, and the tangible and the subconscious, he constructs enigmatic narratives by conflating different fragments of reality. Bak’s pictorial worlds are propelled by constant synthesis and anchored in a deep understanding of the medium’s history. His mottled brushwork and magnetic use of colour evoke the dreamlike works of Symbolist, Surrealist and Nabi painters. Plants seem to sprout from the surface of his canvases and empyrean figures emerge from between leafy areas and flecks of light, breaking down spatial categories. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Bak’s first exhibition at the Berlin gallery, marking the Danish artist’s debut show in Germany.