Draft:Lenz Geerk

Lenz Geerk
Born	1988 (age 37–38) Basel, Switzerland
Education	Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Occupation	Painter
Notable work	Held in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Kunsthaus Zürich, Louis Vuitton Foundation, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, among others

Lenz Geerk (born 1988) is a German painter born in Basel, Switzerland, and based in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Geerk began exhibiting his work publicly during his time as a student. Since then, his work has been presented in various institutions and galleries in Germany and internationally.

He has had multiple solo exhibitions with Roberts Projects and with MASSIMODECARLO. In 2025, he presented lautlos at Domushaus in Basel, his first solo exhibition in his birthplace. The exhibition, held during Art Basel, brought together new paintings exploring stillness, intimacy, longing, and emotional ambiguity. In April 2026, Geerk's first solo exhibition at an Italian institution, Theatre of the Mind, opened at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, where it ran through October 2026.

Work

Geerk's practice is primarily concerned with figurative painting, while also encompassing still lifes and landscapes. His paintings frequently depict solitary or paired figures with anonymous or androgynous features, placed within psychologically charged environments that resist a precise temporal or geographical setting.

A central concern in Geerk's work is the human condition, particularly the relationship between solitude, intimacy, memory, desire, and emotional uncertainty. Rather than constructing conventional narratives, his paintings often depict moments of suspension in which gestures, objects, and relationships remain deliberately unresolved. His figures are frequently characterized by subtle shifts in body language, with small gestures and changes in posture conveying psychological states that remain largely unspoken.

Alongside his figurative paintings, Geerk has developed series of landscapes and still lifes that explore related questions of time, presence, and transience. Recurring motifs include the moon, interiors, beds, fruit, and other everyday objects. In lautlos, for example, a series titled A Lover's Hair focused on the barely visible trace of a strand of hair left on a bed or stool, using the motif to evoke intimacy, absence, memory, and longing.

Geerk's work draws on the visual language of European modernism while employing a restrained approach to colour and composition. Geerk has described ambiguity as a central element of his practice, using combinations of objects, colours, gestures, and situations that resist a single fixed interpretation.

His paintings have also been used as cover art for literary publications; Beteigeuze (2024), a novel by Austrian author Barbara Zeman published by dtv, features one of Geerk's paintings on its cover.

Critical reception

Geerk's work has been discussed in various publications including Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, Mousse Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Domus, Artsy, and The Unibrow. In a 2025 interview with BOMB, Geerk discussed his interest in ambiguity and his approach to combining objects and colours without assigning them fixed symbolic meanings.

Writing about his 2022 exhibition Arrival at Roberts Projects, Mousse Magazine characterized Geerk's paintings as a psychological exploration of desire and attachment. In 2025, Domus discussed his exhibition lautlos at Domushaus in relation to themes of solitude, ambiguity, and the artist's return to Basel, where he spent his childhood.

In his book New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting, author and curator Robert Zeller characterizes Lenz Geerk's work through its distinct expression of psychological inertia and unresolved tension.

Collections

Work by Geerk is held in numerous institutional collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Denver Art Museum; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Rubell Collection, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the HEM Museum, Shunde; the X Museum, Shanghai; the XIAO Museum, Shandong; the Longlati Foundation, Beijing; the Cloud Art Foundation, Nanjing; the Corridor Foundation, Hong Kong; the Comico Art Museum, Oita; the Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul; the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; MART, Rovereto; the Kunsthaus Zürich; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Albertina, Vienna; the Kistefos Museum, Oslo; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; The Arts Club Dubai; Up Next Art, Vega Baja, Puerto Rico.

Selected solo exhibitions

• 2026 – Theatre of the Mind, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
• 2025 – November, MASSIMODECARLO, London, UK
• 2025 – lautlos, Domushaus, Basel, Switzerland
• 2025 – Schwarzweiß, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, US
• 2022 – Moonpaintings, MASSIMODECARLO, Milan, Italy
• 2022 – Arrival, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, US
• 2020 – Sleepless, Mamoth, London, UK
• 2020 – Wuthering Heights, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, US
• 2018 – The Table Portraits, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, US
• 2017 – Crying, Spitting, Sweating, Galerie Valentin, Paris, France
• 2016 – Lotion, Gerhard Hofland Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• 2011 – Frühlings Erwachen, Anna Klinkhammer Galerie, Düsseldorf, Germany

Selected group exhibitions

• 2026 - This Must Be the Place, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK
• 2026 - This is still not a pipe, Gagosian Gallery, London, UK
• 2025 – Portraits Revealed, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, US
• 2025 – STORIES OF YOUR LIVES, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Germany
• 2025 – and yet:, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
• 2024 – Sleep!, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands
• 2024 – Intimacy Rarely Makes Sense of Things, Pond Society, Shanghai, China
• 2023 – ORIZZONTI, Casa Masaccio | Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea, San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy
• 2022 – Highlights of the Permanent Collection, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland
• 2021 – Portraiture One Century Apart, MASSIMODECARLO, Milan, Italy

External links

• Lenz Geerk at MASSIMODECARLO
• Lenz Geerk on Artsy

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• 1988 births
• Living people
• German painters
• Artists from Basel
• People from Düsseldorf
• Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alumni