Opening on May 15, You Have to Change to Stay the Same: De Kooning // Schröder, presented at Jahn und Jahn, Munich, during VARIOUS OTHERS, brings together works on paper by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning and recent paintings by Düsseldorf-based Jana Schröder across the gallery’s two spaces on Baaderstraße. The exhibition places two materially attentive practices in conversation for the first time. Despite the distance between them, both artists move through a similar pictorial terrain: bodies loosen into gesture, gesture thickens into paint, and forms drift between figuration and abstraction. Figures and their surroundings refuse to settle. Instead, they slip and reorganise themselves across the surface, as both artists use the pencil and paint to calibrate their mark-making.

Centred on works produced between 1966 and the early 1970s, the presentation focuses on a turning point in de Kooning’s life. Leaving behind the spit-and-sawdust energy of Manhattan, he spent increasing stretches of time in East Hampton, where the low horizon, changing weather, and coastal light filtered into his work. The drawings and works on paper from these years belong to a period of renewed experimentation. For de Kooning, paper was never secondary to painting but part of the daily rhythm of the studio. He drew on it, brushed colour across it, and pressed it into wet passages of paint, allowing the surface to absorb and resist in equal measure. Thin sheets – often inexpensive newsprint that sometimes reappeared in his canvases as collage – left little room for hesitation and demanded speed. On vellum or heavier wove papers the tempo slowed: marks could be wiped away, reconsidered, returned to. In charcoal and ink the line darts across the sheet, searching, the hand barely pausing as it moves.

Newsprint, especially the browned pages of The New York Times, played a generative role in this process. Headlines, advertisements, and fragments of daily life slipped into the work alongside de Kooning’s restless marks. He often sketched directly on the pages before pressing them onto still-wet canvases so the drawing transferred into the paint surface. The paper absorbed oil and delayed the paint’s drying time, opening a brief interval in which the image could be scraped back and reworked. Drawing and painting fold into one another. Works such as the untitled oil on newspaper from the late 1970s reveal this porous exchange. Shown alongside the major Willem de Kooning Drawing exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (opening 14 June) – the first to examine the full scope of the Rotterdam-born artist’s drawing practice – the exhibition offers visitors to VARIOUS OTHERS a rare opportunity to encounter these works on paper and to see drawing at the core of de Kooning’s process.

Jana Schröder’s recent paintings meet these works with a distinctly contemporary intensity. In the large-scale canvases of her series VISCERAFFIC (2024), bodies seem to unfold rather than simply appear. Limbs extend beyond plausible anatomy; torsos open into luminous cavities; fragments of organs or bone drift to the surface before dissolving again into colour. The figure never stabilises. It stretches across the canvas or folds back into itself, entangled with surrounding forms that press inward from the edges of the composition. Paint behaves like a living material – pooling, staining, smearing, and slipping across the ground – while lines thread through the surface like pathways of transmission. The title VISCERAFFIC merges visceral with traffic, evoking both the body’s interior systems and the circulation of signals through contemporary digital networks. Schröder emphasises the physicality of these lines of circulation, as the canvas becomes a surface where interior and exterior forms continually fold into one another.

Co-curated by Matthew James Holman, a London-based scholar of the transnational history of Abstract Expressionism whose new research will appear in the catalogue for Pollock-Krasner: Past Continuous at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in October, the exhibition situates these two practices within a wider conversation about drawing and the evolving language of painting. Across decades and contexts, both artists return to the same question: how a subject might emerge from pencil or paint – and how quickly it can dissolve again.