REITER presents Back to Back to Back, parallel exhibitions in Berlin and Leipzig featuring German artists Christian Holze and Anselm Reyle alongside Hungarian artist Márton Nemes. The three artists, coming back to back, engage with fundamental questions of contemporary painting. Superimposition, material plurality, and the traditional picture format are scrutinised, resulting in what Baudrillard might call an “‘aesthetic’ hallucination of reality.” Uniting their individually transgressive practices, the artists create their alternate versions of reality – self-referential environments in which painting, sculpture, and installation become indistinguishable. Their idiosyncratic painterly techniques and visual systems intensify perceptual experiences. Far exceeding the limits of art historical conventions, the works stimulate material awareness and conceptual cross-referentiality. Together, Holze, Nemes, and Reyle construct total visual and auditory environments that transcend the boundaries between media, subject and object, and the physical and virtual realms. The exhibitions are immaterially linked by an original soundtrack composed by Péter Hencz, based on the artists’ musical preferences – an absorbing soundscape that blends techno, metal, and noise, punctuated by brief moments of acoustic harmony. Released on vinyl, the dual exhibition concept echoes the A/B sides of records. 
 –  Text by Hanna Claris

In the series ‘The Most Boring Artist I Know’, Christian Holze engages with Cy Twombly’s abstract interpretation of Raphaels School of Athens by combining AI-generated image fragments and digital editing with painterly interventions a reflection on art history, appropriation, and the fusion of digital and analog image production. 

In the ‘Synchronicity Paintings’, Márton Nemes stages a virtual extension of the painting act by transferring analog brushstrokes into the digital realm and animating them with LED light. Painting thus becomes a multi-layered, simultaneous interplay of materiality and virtuality.

Anselm Reyle’s ceramic objects are cylindrical, glazed, and painted forms treated like painterly surfaces. 
They merge the craftsmanship of ceramics with the aesthetic of his visual language reflective, color-intensive, and often deliberately imperfect. The works address themes like materiality, everyday culture, and decoration, translating his typical stylistic elements into a sculptural, physical form. 

In the ‘Time Sleep’ series, Christian Holze presents the sleeping Ariadne in digitally created sculptural pairings with Adonis or the Dying Gaul. He draws on classical motifs, transforming them through digital reconstruction, duplication, and painterly interventions into hybrid visual worlds exploring the cultural proximity of sleep and death as well as the shifting nature of originality and reproduction in contemporary art.

Márton Nemes’ ‘Sound Paintings’ are hybrid works combining painting with sound. Speakers are integrated into the colorful, often layered wall objects, playing custom-composed sound pieces. Visual and auditory layers merge into multisensory images painting becomes audible, space becomes a resonating body. 

Christian Holze’s sculpture ‘Castor & Pollux & Castor & Pollux’ is a multi-layered exploration of authorship, reproduction, and art-historical attribution. It is based on a 3D scan of the Ildefonso Group a Roman marble copy that itself refers to Greek originals and was later modified in the Baroque period. Through digital transformation and duplication, Holze creates a copy of the copy of the copy, exposing the instability of the original. Linked to motifs such as ‘Amor and Psyche’ or ‘Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell’, the sculpture becomes a reflection on cultural heritage and media transmission. Holze’s work merges past and present into a single object and positions itself as a critical, contemporary continuation of historical forms.

In Antinoos&Antinoos, Christian Holze revisits the Farnese Antinous—a Roman statue from the 2nd century CE depicting the youthful, deified lover of Emperor Hadrian as an idealized Greek figure. Already an adaptation of Greek prototypes, Holze extends this logic through digital mirroring and chromatic doubling.

Two Antinous figures, mirrored in form and color, become a dual image of symmetry and difference. Holze's sculpture becomes a "copy of a copy"—not a loss, but a strategy: a reflection on reproduction, memory, digital image culture, and above all, authorship. Who speaks in such images? Who owns them? And what remains of the original?

A specially produced vinyl record will be released to accompany the Back to Back to Back exhibition, serving as a sonic link between the two exhibition venues and the three participating artists – Christian Holze, Márton Nemes, and Anselm Reyle. The composition, created by Péter Hencz, is based on the musical preferences of the artists.

Márton Nemes’ monumental enamel panel wall, first shown at the 2024 Venice Biennale, appears in Leipzig as the largest installation of the series to date expanding the medium of painting into a simulated, multimedia spatial image. 

Anselm Reyle’s stripe paintings are vibrant works made from industrial materials like foils and lacquers, playing with reflective surfaces and precise color bands. They reference modernist painting and transform it into shiny, artificial objects oscillating between high art and kitsch.

Reyle’s neon paintings combine crinkled, mirrored foil in intense colors with glowing neon words or forms. These works play with light, reflection, and surface appeal, creating an artificial, almost overstimulated aesthetic that shifts between pop, trash, and art market glamour an ironic homage to consumer culture and modern visual language.

In the ‘Law of Attraction’ series, Márton Nemes combines glazed porcelain with backgrounds sprayed in color gradients. The ceramic elements function as three-dimensional, frozen brushstrokes, merging the organic with the artificial by combining bodily forms and industrial- like surfaces an expression of his engagement with materiality, transformation, and the tension between nature and digital aesthetics. 

Christian Holze’s ‘Sixfold Artemis & Iphigenia’ is based on a sculpture that was reconstructed and heavily modified in the 19th century presumably by Bertel Thorvaldsen and his students using ancient fragments. Holze takes up this speculative reconstruction, evident in the overloaded gestures and multiplicity of figures, and digitally amplifies it into a dense, sculptural spiral. The work reflects on historical appropriation, the uncertainty of the original, and art-historical connections.

Entering the labyrinthine gallery space of REITER Berlin, it immediately transpires from the intimate positioning of Holze’s Nothing New (2025) and Time Sleep (2024) and Nemes’s Irreversible Paintings 01 and 02 (2025) on a black, orange and purple spray-painted background by Reyle, that the three artists explore the superimposition, intermediality and simultaneity of their different visual languages. Reyle, Nemes, and Holze share a vision of exploring painting in spatial terms. Reyle, who often extracts materials from the urban fabric such as Mylar foil, neon tubes, high-gloss lacquer, or volcanic-glazed ceramics, seizes the gallery space through the territorial and vandalic act of spray-painting the rooms with a fire extinguisher. Known for examining the domain between high art and kitsch, he is fascinated by plastic, gaudy glamour, and gravitates towards the material recasting of spaces, probing the concept of the real as simulation. In this intervention, Reyle uses the wall as a carrier for paint, evoking distant associations of mysterious prehistoric cave art surface alongside those of graffiti. Nemes, whose origins in art are rooted in graffiti and dilapidated urban settings, also uses spray paint in most of his compositions. Progressing through the rooms, structural overlaying becomes a central theme with Holze’s characteristic use of aluminium frameworks facilitating an overlapping, dynamic installation style. Shifting the picture from the wall into space and revealing both front and back, Holze interrogates traditional displays of art, implying notions of visibility and obscurity, emphasis and neglect. Set against the rawness of Reyle’s paint and the physicality of Nemes’s stratification, Holze’s glossy and hyperrealistic inkjet prints – reappropriations of mainly ancient Greek artefacts – point to the all- consuming artistic use of digital technologies that produce humanly unachievable effects. Holze’s sculptural piece Castor & Pollux & Castor & Pollux (2025) integrates three paintings into a three-dimensional work, embodying the adaptability of various media, engaging the viewer’s body and entangling perceptions. 

While traditionally two-dimensional works are thought to be about framing, narrative and illusion, the three artists’ destabilising gestures incite notions of relationality, tension and immersion. While Holze embraces artificial intelligence as a pigment of the digital age, Nemes is continually reaching for new mediums. He uses industrial processes including laser-cutting and powder-coating as a prosthesis of his painting practice. Exploring the expansibility of paintings through the deconstruction and reassembly of painted layers, he adheres only to the wall-bound and layered quality of paintings. Building his compositions from enlarged, digitised brushstrokes, he immanently signals the human touch in multiply overwritten marks, while metaphorically solidifying malleable paint in metal. By embedding LEDs in the picture plane in Synchronicity Paintings 08 and 09 (2025), Nemes indicates the omnipresence of virtuality, preserving and prolonging the physical act of painting through a virtual animation of paint-like gestures. His desire to augment the scope of painting is further realised by assimilating sound resonance into Stereo Paintings 08a and 08b (2025), creating hybrid speaker pieces that play singular compositions by Péter Hencz. 

Holze, Nemes, and Reyle create a hyperreality that distorts the original reality they once referred to, ultimately dissecting painting as a genre into disparate components. Each artist foregrounds the pure act of production, generating their own teleological values in art. Nemes’s Irreversible Paintings search for the final cause, that for him is the spatial and perceptive expansion of painting; for Holze, it is simulation – the phenomena between real and artificial, natural and virtual; and for Reyle, the inexplicability of illusions. 

In the vestibule of REITER Leipzig, an installation by Christian Holze situates inkjet prints on his characteristic aluminium framework, recalling industrial storage systems, and forming a dialogue with Stereo Paintings 08c (2025) by Márton Nemes, which adds auditory dimension to the exhibition. Echoing Holze’s extension into space through dynamic exhibition architecture, Nemes expands painting through invisible sound frequencies. The hybrid speaker piece plays compositions by Péter Hencz. Responding to the inherent layeredness and extensibility of painting, Nemes’s Stereo Paintings, textural, multisensory, wall-mounted painting-objects, embody medium hybridity and interdisciplinarity. Throughout the exhibition, traditional formats of art are destabilised with works overlapping physically and conceptually engaging with the superimposition, intermediality, and simultaneity of distinct visual languages. Together they dissect and reconfigure fundamental elements of painting – field and frame; foreground, middle ground and background; material, form, and colour. 

Holze, Nemes, and Reyle explore relationality, tension and immersion guided by the shared belief that painting, as an extension and alteration of a perceived reality, must continually reinvent itself and exceed beyond boundaries. While Reyle claims the Berlin gallery by spray-painting its walls, in Leipzig, Nemes shields the space with his monumental enamel wall. He operates with the idea of simulation through computerising and magnifying once hand-painted gestures – a method mirrored in Holze’s adjacent print interfacing innovation and imitation. Holze reconditions classical artefacts as flattened, cybernetic and glossy picture planes through diverse digital tools, challenges the received notions of subjectivity and authorship. His surfaces are pseudo-perfectionist as, upon closer investigation, they often expose overpainted brushstrokes on the print itself, oscillating between reality and artifice, authenticity and simulation. He is the only artist dealing with figuration and an impressive array of digital technologies, including 3D scanning and artificial intelligence, turning the production process itself abstract. 

Inflaming the senses and eulogising materiality, a piece from Reyle’s iconic Stripes series is hung directly on the enamel wall, playing with layering both within and across artworks. Interweaving aesthetic values of modernism with synthetic textures, Reyle questions reality as an apparition. In his practice, steeped in reflections, optical illusions, and synthetic artifice, he surveys the division between high art and kitsch, feeding on the glitzy, tawdry materiality of everyday urban environments, resorting to materials like Mylar foil, neon tubes, or high-gloss lacquer. Both Reyle and Nemes, who share a history of working with artificial materials, arrive at the organic medium of clay, embracing the philosophy of wabi sabi – an appreciation of uniqueness and imperfection. Treating this malleable material much like paint, Reyle uses ceramics as cylindrical picture planes, alluding to domesticity and social-political contexts. Nemes, meanwhile, handles porcelain as three-dimensional, solidified brushstrokes. In Law of Attraction 09 and 10 (2025), glazed ceramics affixed to the gradient-sprayed backdrops evoke the real and hyperreal, organic and artificial. His corporeal ceramic forms resonate with the bodily curves in Holze’s compositions, revealing a shared sensibility across media and subject matter. 

This layeredness culminates in two exclusive collaborative works by Holze and Nemes, fusing figuration and abstraction, physical and virtual realms. Holze, Nemes, and Reyle stage exhibitions that are meta-constructs, reflecting on what painting is and could be. Through spatial, material, and conceptual interplay, they add a palimpsestic layer to their dialogue on form, perception, and hyperreality. 

– Hanna Claris