BERLIN.- Galerie Max Hetzler is presenting a solo exhibition with collages and video works by illustrator, artist and author Christoph Niemann at Bleibtreustrasse 45. This is Niemann's third exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin.

Christoph Niemann is known for his humorous and poetic illustrations in which he often brings onto paper the complex, unpredictable and partly absurd situations of daily life with only a few lines and basic means precisely.

At Galerie Max Hetzler Niemann presents a group of video works and thus enters a new visual territory. The occupation with moving images already appears during the last years in his apps and computer animations, often in combination or emerging from Niemann’s drawings. But within the last months during his travels, Niemann collected numerous short film sequences of everyday moments on the street, the park, the beach and modified these by simple editing processes: cuts, mirroring, duplications. In this way, the seemingly familiar becomes – at times barely noticeable – alienated and newly connoted. The works challenge the viewer to look carefully and continue Niemann’s typical glance onto his own environment, which already defines his drawings and illustrations. It's the mundane things and moments that he dedicates his attention to and which question our customary patterns of perception only through a few simple shifts.

Alongside his video works, a new series of collages will be displayed in the exhibition. Here, Niemann joins aluminium foil and ink to create minimalistic sceneries which unfold a special impression of plasticity and surface texture through the contrast of the two materials.

Christoph Niemann was born in 1970 in Waiblingen, he lives and works in Berlin. After studying at the University of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, in 1997 Niemann moved to New York City where from 1997 through 2008 he had his principle residence. His illustrations are published on covers in magazines such as The New Yorker, Time Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Wired and the ZEITmagazin. Recently, his works were exhibited at the Cartoonmuseum, Basel; the SVA Gallery, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (all 2017); the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg (2016) and the Museum for Applied Art, Vienna (2015), among others. His drawings are still on view through 5 January 2018 at Galerie Stihl in Waiblingen.