Geerk Domus Haus Basel
MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present lautlos, the first exhibition by Lenz Geerk in Basel. On view during Art Basel 2025, lautlos brings Geerk back to his birthplace with a series of new paintings that deepen his exploration of stillness and emotional ambiguity.
Installed in the iconic Domushaus - a postwar modernist building that once housed Switzerland’s first museum for architecture - the exhibition unfolds around themes of intimacy, longing, and the gravity of endings.
The title, lautlos - German for ‘soundless’- serves as a prelude to a series of intimate, emotionally calibrated paintings where stillness becomes its own kind of presence. Each painting is anchored by a singular colour - green, red, orange - continuing Geerk’s ongoing investigation into tonal atmospheres. The rooms are sparse, the gestures minimal, the energy held rather than released.
Geerk has always been more interested in feeling than in narrative. In lautlos, he leans into that ambiguity. His figures don’t perform - they wait, they linger, they vanish. The paintings feel suspended in time, somewhere between memory and anticipation. They invite viewers into a space where nothing dramatic happens, yet everything feels on the verge.
A new series within the exhibition, titled A Lover’s Hair, centres on the near-invisible trace of a single strand of hair - held, forgotten, left behind on a bed or a stool. These small details hint at tenderness, absence, and secrecy. Geerk was drawn to the understated intensity of the motif and its narrative potential. It might be a trace left by a lover, the evidence of an affair, or even a token kept and offered in longing. They speak to the afterglow of intimacy - the way objects, gestures, and memories take on lives of their own, long after the moment has passed. In their restraint, they echo the show’s title: soundless, yet full of feeling.
An earlier work, Witnessing Death, introduces a different kind of stillness. There’s no spectacle, only presence, the act of watching something fade. Geerk’s composition is spare and controlled. What might first appear as a simple scene becomes a reflection on transience and the weight of endings. Without dramatising, the painting holds space for an experience that is both deeply personal and universally shared. It’s not about mourning but about noticing - being present in the delicate space between what remains and what is slipping away.
lautlos doesn’t seek resolution, nor does it require one. It offers something rarer: space to feel, space to stay with what’s unresolved. In the silence of these paintings, something lingers.
Artista
Lenz Geerk è nato a Basilea nel 1988. Vive e lavora a Düsseldorf, in Germania.
I suoi dipinti hanno qualcosa di rivelatorio: scene intime, emotivamente dense, che sembrano esistere fuori dal tempo. Il suo linguaggio visivo è radicato nella storia dell’arte, ma è attraversato da una voce profondamente personale. Le figure che abitano le sue tele sembrano emergere da sogni o da pensieri ad occhi aperti, con gesti che rispondono più all’emozione che alla realtà.
Geerk costruisce ogni composizione intorno a impercettibili variazioni nel linguaggio del corpo – una spalla ricurva, uno sguardo che si sofferma – dettagli minimi che lasciano intravedere ciò che non viene detto. La sua tavolozza di colori è sobria, dominata da tonalità pastello, talvolta interrotta da accenti più caldi. L’atmosfera è densa, talvolta tesa, ma mai urlata.
Geerk indaga la solitudine, non come isolamento, ma come pausa introspettiva. Le sue figure abitano se stesse, e nel farlo invitano lo spettatore a fare altrettanto. Nei suoi dipinti affiora spesso una sottile ironia o tenerezza, come se l’opera sapesse qualcosa che sceglie di non rivelare apertamente. Geerk cattura l’essenza della condizione umana, esplorando le profondità della psiche e la complessità delle emozioni.