Image courtesy of Scherben and the Goethe-Institut Chicago

Two Roses and a Briar Pipe
Scherben and the Goethe-Institut Chicago
September 19th - October 24th, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, September 19th, 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Exhibiting artists: John Neff, Morag Keil, Connor Crawford, Adrian Piper, Jasia Rabiej

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 film DESPAIR, a chocolate manufacturer named Hermann Hermann slowly goes mad against the backdrop of Weimar Germany’s descent into fascism. As his wife drifts in and out of the narrative with her artist lover Ardalion, Hermann concocts a doppelganger scheme in order to stage his own murder. The title of this exhibition is taken from a nondescript still life painting that Hermann glimpses in the artist’s studio of two rosebuds and a tobacco pipe. On the back of the canvas someone has drawn a crude swastika. The artist claims offhandedly that it was drawn by his neighbor’s son, and only Hermann reacts in rational alarm. Filming both political and psychological fragmentation with characteristic detachment, Fassbinder blurs the boundaries between sanity and delusion to reveal the two faces of social life - one floral, labored, and mundane, the other scrawled and violent.

Taking its cue from the dual qualities of this painting, this exhibition brings together works by five established and emerging artists based in Berlin, Vienna, and Chicago whose work conveys a shared sense of alienation and political inefficacy. As isolationist and illiberal tendencies increasingly dominate the relationship between the U.S. and Europe, the artists in this exhibition focus on more subtle, individual senses of division and disassociation. In prop-like sculptures and installations, these works play with the staging and performance of national and social identities. Drawing on architectural history, social media, and banality and routine as both subjects and source material, these works suggest a quiet sense of futility and rupture.

This exhibition is presented by Scherben and the Goethe-Institut Chicago, and is co-curated by Tarik Kentouche, Lorenz Liebig, and Leah Gallant. It will open in Scherben’s Berlin space in spring 2026.