MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present November, Lenz Geerk’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in London and his first return to the city in six years.
November arrives with the sweet-sour smell of a fruit bowl turning: peaches that were perfect in September now surrendering to bruise and bloom. Geerk is drawn to that hinge, what lingers after ripeness, what begins as something ends. November frames an exhibition guided by feeling – the experience of uncertainty, and the persistence to keep going.
Born in 1988 in Basel, Switzerland, and now living and working in Düsseldorf, Geerk paints scenes that feel like revelations - intimate moments that seem to float outside of time. The exhibition gathers three strands - haircuts, still lifes, and a storefront - into a single season, a climate of attention for small, ordinary acts. Geerk builds atmospheres out of grey-greens, mauves, rusts, and bruised pinks - tones that hover between shadow and afterglow.
In the haircut series, intimacy is staged at close range: a pair negotiating blades and trust, one seated in vulnerability, the other holding the shears. The vertical format elongates the encounter, turning an ordinary trim into something ritualistic, even a little dangerous. Flesh tones are chalky, almost earthen, as if the body were drawn from the ground.
The still lifes carry November’s melancholy more literally. Pears and peaches slump on folded cloth, their skins overtaken by mold that Geerk paints with a startling tenderness. This rot is not grotesque but luminous - the blue-green fuzz becomes a kind of halo, dignifying what has passed its season. One canvas shows a peach on a plate interrupted by a moth, its shadow falling across the bowl like a small reminder of mortality. Rather than warnings about vanity, these works feel closer to everyday prayers, suggesting that even decay deserves to be portrayed.
If the haircuts turn inward and the still lifes hold still, the storefront faces outward. Shop windows appear flat and frontal, staging hats for display. Its muted tones and restrained signage suggest persistence rather than opulence. This façade insists on being seen, even in difficult times.
Threaded among these strands are other figures: a dancer pivoting against a grey ground, a woman in a white coat gazing at a sculpture. They extend the exhibition’s atmosphere of going on despite dim light. Even destruction carries its afterlife - one painting shows a broken vase spilling petals under a field of gold, shards scattered but glowing. Another depicts a woman calmly burning what might be a drawing, a letter, or a photograph, as if discarding failure could itself become an act of making.
Geerk’s work absorbs the noise of the present. They are not political in slogan but humane in their attention to survival - small rituals, minor displays, private doubts staged with lucid intensity. November is a season where mold is luminous, vulnerability monumental, and humanity carries on, against the odds.
