Anna Vogel & Malte Zenses

For Paris Internationale 2024, Sperling presents a duo exhibition featuring Anna Vogel and Malte Zenses, two artists who explore the potential for romantic and beautiful elements within post-apocalyptic utopias. In this cohesive presentation, they pose a provocative question: How long can we continue like this, and what comes after?

Anna Vogel (b. 1981) blends photography, drawing, and printmaking to investigate themes of digital communication, nature, history, and biology. Her work plays with the medium of photography, pushing its boundaries through extensive analog and digital image manipulation. In her series Ignifer, she presents an evocative visual analogy between “carrying fire” and “fighting fire.” The images depict aerial firefighting scenes devoid of planes, leaving behind only clouds of red, blue, and white fire-retardant chemicals cascading over desolate landscapes. These abstracted images resemble natural phenomena, yet paradoxically embody their opposite – human intervention in nature’s destruction.

Malte Zenses (b. 1987) draws on his ambivalent fascination with historical moments where the terrible and the hopeful coexist. His works integrate painted elements from his personal drawing archive with fragments from (post-)apocalyptic films. In the presentation at Paris Internationale, a central figure appears to kneel in despair, confronting the realization that the world’s collapse is a consequence of human actions. Influenced by subcultures, zines, and punk symbolism, Zenses’ practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and music. Textiles – often second-hand clothing – serve as both canvas and sculptural material, inviting reflection on themes of class, gender, and identity.

Together, Vogel and Zenses offer a meditation on our current path, highlighting the tension between destruction and beauty, despair and resilience, and questioning the uncertain future that lies ahead.