Exhibition of a new body of works by Maria Hinze
Invited by Leila Hamid–staged at X Verleih AG
X Verleih AG / X Filme Creative Pool GmbH: Köpenicker Str. 20, 10997 Berlin
On view: December 15, 2025 – March 29, 2026
Only by Appointment
Transience, inhabiting in still motion: situated at the tectonic interstices of continuity, dynamic action and the circumstance of flux itself, Maria Hinze’s exhibition at X Filme is a reflection on the transitory state.
Berlin’s beloved ‘moving pictures’ have been moving house and the collection has found a seat on the very bank of the river Spree. The watercourse’s vital and literal flow converses with the formal liquidity of the paintings, reinforcing the metaphorical pursuits of this programme. Resonances abound in Hinze’s newest series: fleeting images imbued with their own illusory activity seem to flicker with changeable figures, substitutes for our own private catalogues of fears, for our lexicons of assumed truths and fragile certainties. The place and the picture are the core dyad, a state of flux become sounding board between artifact and fact.
We arrive at Hinze’s work: in this iteration the artist exhibits a series of paintings arranged precisely in a bright white space. Within the frame, colours wash and recede, the momentum of the artist’s original gesture determined to continue somehow. No definition is permitted, only that imposed by the absolute of canvas size. This dissipation is a meditation on the imagined original form: if there were ever a subject, a figure, an object, we have come after
the moment of being. If there is ever to be one, we are too early.
Hinze insists, in this exhibit, we are exactly on time to witness ‘nothing’. Between time, with the artist, we pursue the inflected line, the subtle bloom of colours interface and tease definition. Only vibrancy and motion cohere.
All is as it should be, at the border of unbeing: here Hinze invites the viewer to drift along the Proustian meditation on ephemerality, on the visual rhyme, on the dreamstate that folds consciousness into the imaginary and abandons us of our selves as much as to our selves. Formless yet imbued with instinctive directionality. Colour and saturation are conclusive, the line less so, in contrast with other works by Hinze which foreground the line and evade the frame. Softly, in layers and lapping waves, colours disappear into increasingly soft flushes – fading and becoming the transitory ‘nothing’ that occupies Hinze.
A figure appears only in the vaguest implication, receding or approaching or not there at all, the only constant is absence: the nothingness of something not yet internalized. Figure and form exist only at the concatenation of intent and interpretation: fields of colour deliver a dreamlike affect. It is a memory implanted, a nostalgia without experience as in/significant as a smudge of pigment on the sleeve of the shirt of a stranger who passes without acknowledging you, the paint on their clothing, or the interaction that was not had beyond the imagined exchange.
Parallelisms, a formal term in literary critique, cross the genre barrier in this exhibition that takes great inspiration from Proust’s « À la recherche du temps perdu » or “In Search of Lost Time”. Uncanny echoes of thoughts in motion are rendered visual and material in this exhibit. What remains of an image when it is absent – the outline is the container of the figure, whereas these canvases flood colour without boundary, the image stops at the frame as each is obliged to do.
Transporting literary methods to the visual medium is the artist’s communication into the continuing discourse nucleated by Proust’s novel. Can alliteration be the same as monochromatism? Could a composition be evacuated of subject and take up the portraiture of absence or non-being via painting? Can we behold it?
Expanding on the concept that nature abhors a vacuum, Hinze explores reactions to the void by depicting ephemerality. Hypothetically, the human mind detests total emptiness, balks at the undefinable and uncouples itself from that which we call the natural world with ease until confronted, until catalyzed. The instinct to people the emptiness, to categorize the undefined is a deep fear – we forget as easily as we are forgotten. The unrelenting static of consciousness strains against nonexistence. Hinze reminds us that nothingness is the seat of being, the void is an opening and the locus of beginning. Surfacing through the tension is that which floats, loosely tethered and unlimited – your self.
Text written in collaboration with jes dolan
Maria Hinze