CHAOS - die Ausstellung /// Sieben Positionen zeitgenössischer Malerei

In the organizer's words:

CHAOS - the exhibition

Seven positions of contemporary painting

SALON - DIE MALBUDE, Düsseldorf

May 8 to 10, 2026

Chaos is not a failure of order. Chaos is a state. A starting point. An honest inventory.

Seven artists - Andrea Bock, Henrik Drescher, Tobias Hauck, Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann, Leander Kresse, Gordan Nikolic and Sven Vieweg - are showing current works at SALON - DIE MALBUDE that could hardly be more contrasting in their diversity. And yet they have something in common: the courage to seek artistic truth in the unfinished, the contradictory, the raw.

Andrea Bock paints living things - people, animals, nature - with a directness that allows no distance. Henrik Drescher writes sentences in his works that hurt: laconic, vulnerable, without a net. Tobias Hauck is committed to color as his own cosmos - fast and wild at first glance, calculated and precise at second. Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann creates images that both reflect and question the zeitgeist: pop, politics, collective memory. Leander Kresse, a master student of Prof. Markus Lüpertz, seeks the here and now in the painterly moment - the unrepeatable existence of the picture in space. Gordan Nikolic - alias Gott Gordan - provokes with a drasticness that deliberately scratches at the boundaries of taste in order to look where others look away. Sven Vieweg combines image and sound to create an intermedial work that oscillates between silence and electricity.

Chaos: Seven positions. Three floors. No consensus - and that is exactly the intention.

CHAOS - The Night

Drescher & Elektrohorror / Live

SALON - DIE MALBUDE, Düsseldorf

May 9, 8 p.m. Elektrohorror/Drescher Live

When pictures are no longer enough, noise takes over.

For the exhibition evening, SALON - DIE MALBUDE will be transformed into a resonance room: Henrik Drescher and Sven Vieweg - known as Drescher and Elektrohorror - will bring their soundscapes to the stage. Noise. Electro. No comfort, no compromise.

What appears as subliminal tension in their visual works is discharged here live and without filters. Two artists who also leave no peace in terms of sound - raw, electronic, consistent.

Saturday 8 pm. If you go too early, you'll miss the best part of the chaos.

Opening: May 8, 6 p.m.

May 8, 6 - 10 p.m.

May 9, 6 - 10 p.m. - 8 p.m. Elektrohorror/Drescher Live

May 10, 3 - 8 p.m.

SALON - THE PAINTING BOOTH

"Chaos" - current art positions

Adersstraße 75 (backyard)

40215 Düsseldorf

May 8 - 10, 2026

Further information per artist:

Andrea Bock is a freelance painter and graphic artist who lives and works in Rosenheim and Düsseldorf. She studied painting with Prof. Markus Lüpertz and Siegfried Anzinger. Since 2016, her paintings have been regularly shown at exhibitions in Germany and abroad. Her work includes paintings and sculptures that combine irony and experimentation. Inspired by advertising, art history, trends and everyday madness, the creature plays a central role and is staged as if on a theater stage.

Henrik Drescher was born in Düsseldorf in 1968, studied in Düsseldorf and lives and works in Berlin. His works include paintings and objects behind glass (vinyl, acrylic), often with laconic, emotional titles such as "last hope", "angst und sorge" or "when we were young we wanted to die". The works are characterized by a raw, direct visual language.

Drescher is Henrik's Berlin-based solo project. With releases such as "Living with Purpose and Depth", "I do not think" or "Live at Subsol", a body of work is emerging that is as laconic and uncompromising as his visual works. The split tape "Aus dem Schleim" has already been produced together with Elektrohorror - a foretaste of what can be expected at the live performance.

Tobias Hauck describes his painting as "mezzanine" - a term for a low mezzanine floor, which for him describes an intermediate position in the art world. His painting is fast and perhaps wild-looking, but calculated and calculated. Originally influenced by the Brücke painters, color is his central passion. He works in large-format painting and drawing, whereby landscape paintings are dominated by fragments and abbreviations of form in a rapid gesture - a radical painting reduced to the bare essentials, which creates an unmistakable directness on the borderline between representation and informal non-representationalism.

Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann works in the fields of painting, collage, graphics and time-based media. His series of works bear titles such as "Zeitgeist-Camo", "Mausoleum", "SuperSonic Disco", "make america great again" or "utopia_lost_in_chaos" - which suggests an intensive engagement with contemporary culture, pop, politics and zeitgeist. He also writes art theory texts and publishes regularly.

Leander Kresse was born in Dortmund in 1974 and studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1995 to 2001, where he became a master student of Prof. Markus Lüpertz in 2001. From 2005 to 2008, he held a teaching position for painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. He lives and works in Düsseldorf and Raubling/Bavaria and has been a lecturer at the Bad Reichenhall and Kolbermoor art academies since 2018. The homepage of his website quotes Walter Benjamin about the "here and now" of the artwork - a reference to his interest in the aura and presence of the original. Kresse shows paintings and graphics, with an extensive annual archive since 2017.

Gordan Nikolić, artist name GOTT GORDAN since 2013, was born in 1968. He studied graphic design in Düsseldorf from 1992 to 2001 and was an assistant for nude drawing under Prof. Rudi Assmann. He lives and works in the Ruhr area and has been exhibiting since 1994. He is co-founder of the artist groups "tausendmeister" (1995), "GOLD" (2001) and "GOTT & GILZ" (2018). gottgordan His series of works - including "Transformer", "Barbieland", "Sexdolls", "Crumples", "Raumfresser" - as well as the press quote by Jürgen Boebers-Süßmann (WAZ) characterize his "art of drasticness", which consciously takes into account classifications such as tasteless, sexist or politically incorrect in painterly provocation.

Sven Vieweg works artistically and musically. Under the project name "Elektrohorror", he has been running sound projects with live sets at venues such as the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf since 2002. In terms of visual art, he has created groups of works such as "Elixier der Verdammnis" (large-format canvases, 160×160 cm, 2014) and "Vierzig biometrische Portraits" (2021, catalog in an edition of 50 copies). His website shows a combination of painting, graphics and audiovisual projects - an intermedia practice at the interface of image and sound.

Elektrohorror is the sound project of Düsseldorf painter Sven Vieweg. Brutally minimalist and full of energy - that's how the project describes itself. Live sets, releases and an extensive archive document a consistent practice of Elektrohorror somewhere between noise, industrial and electronic avant-garde. All available on Vimeo, Youtube and Bandcamp.