Special exhibition: ‘Constellations’

“RAINER WÖLZL – CONSTELLATIONS”
6 June to 9 August 2026
Opening: Friday, 5 June 2026, 7 pm

The Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Berlin is presenting “Constellations,” a comprehensive solo exhibition by Austrian artist Rainer Wölzl. The exhibition offers a compelling insight into the multifaceted work of an artist who has been grappling with the cultural, social, and political upheavals of our time for decades.

Rainer Wölzl, born in Vienna in 1954, works primarily with charcoal drawing today. His mostly large-format works are based on art-historical and media-based visual sources. He takes up motifs with contemporary historical and current sociopolitical relevance and, through montage, transforms them into complex visual constellations in which past and present converge.

The exhibition brings together works from a long-term project developed under the broader concept of a “Museum of Shadows.” The notion of the shadow functions here as both a poetic and political space for reflection—as a trace of the past, a surface for projection, and a component of both individual and collective memory.

At the heart of Wölzl’s work lies a continuous reflection on power structures, oppression, and their various manifestations in different social contexts. His artistic practice is conceived as a strategy of appropriation and transformation: visual material is not merely cited, but recomposed, shifted, and transferred into an open space of meaning.

Characteristic of Wölzl’s works is their multi-part nature as well as a grid-like structure that creates distance while simultaneously allowing for precise socio-political reflection. In deliberate contrast to the visual overload of digital imagery, the works stand as a testament against historical amnesia and for the enduring power of the drawn image.

The exhibition is the artist’s second museum presentation in Berlin, following his 2002 showing at the Georg Kolbe Museum, where he presented the extensive series “Aesthetics of Resistance” on Peter Weiss.