Matti Braun—Rion

For Berlin Art Week 2025, BQ presents a solo exhibition by Matti Braun (b. 1968, Berlin), featuring a new series of glass works.

Matti Braun sees objects as sedimented forms, crystallisations of overlapping stories. His works map a network of global transmission processes, serving simultaneously as trace and catalyst. They challenge cultural attributions and conventions of originality, authorship, and modernity.

From Indian cultural history to science fiction, batik, and glass, Braun explores aesthetic spheres beyond the conventional art world. He conducts research, visits production sites, and learns traditional techniques. Temporarily, he becomes part of micro- and macro-systems at the margins of cities, countries, and narratives. This long-term experimentation has produced plays, installations, lectures, as well as photographs, assemblages, paintings, and objects.

In his exhibition ›Rion‹, Braun presents new, traditionally hand-blown plate glass works in a variety of colours, forming a transparent window installation. The installation is accompanied by other three-dimensional glass objects and new batik paintings. The glass discs capture fluid states, reflect their surroundings, and interact with light and weather. Like the batik works, they oscillate between everyday object, cultural reference, minimal art, image, and concrete object. Each piece is unique—one possibility among many: concentrated, handmade, yet devoid of an individual signature. They follow a migratory logic, in which materials, perceptions, and meanings are constantly in flux.

Text by Juliane Duft