OSNABRÜCK.- Kunsthalle Osnabrück is presenting Tribute to Bicce, an exhibition by Hamburg-based artist Aleen Solari that looks at the rituals, symbols, and social codes of football fan culture through the lens of painting, installation, and everyday language.

On view through October 11, 2026, the exhibition takes as its starting point the subcultural spaces surrounding sport: fan sections, clubhouses, the edges of playing fields, pubs, and other places where identity and belonging are formed. For Solari, these are spaces of community, but also spaces marked by exclusion, hierarchy, and coded forms of behavior.

Solari is known for expanding painting beyond the traditional canvas. In her work, surfaces, objects, and spatial situations become part of a larger pictorial world. She often draws from popular culture and everyday life, including music, fashion, youth slang, and sport, using these materials to explore how groups create shared identities.

In Tribute to Bicce, Solari turns particular attention to the ways masculinity, physical strength, and competition are performed within football fan culture. The exhibition asks how these spaces are organized, what gestures and words define them, and who is allowed to belong. Like many other social environments, football culture can also be shaped by exclusion based on gender, sexuality, and the body. Solari addresses these dynamics by working with found objects, slogans, gestures, and terms associated with fan culture, reworking them into a new artistic context.

The title of the exhibition points directly to the politics of language. “Bicce” is an old word meaning “female dog” and is considered one of the origins of the modern English word “bitch,” a term long used as an insult against women. In recent decades, however, musicians, activists, and queer communities have reclaimed the word as a form of self-definition and resistance. In that shift, an insult can lose some of its power and become a sign of self-determination.

Solari’s exhibition moves through this charged territory with a sharp awareness of how words, bodies, and spaces are connected. Her work does not simply document football culture from the outside. Instead, it enters its visual and verbal codes, takes them apart, and asks how they might be rearranged.





Aleen Solari lives and works in Hamburg. She studied painting with Jutta Koether, Anselm Reyle, and Monika Baer at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Her recent solo exhibitions include presentations at Neues Museum Nürnberg, Kunstverein Jesteburg, and Stadtgalerie Künstlerhaus Lauenburg. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions in Hamburg, Kiel, Manila, and Leipzig. From 2024 to 2025, she was Professor of Painting in the Fine Art department at Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel.

Tribute to Bicce is presented with support from the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture, the VGH Foundation, the Friedel & Gisela Bohnenkamp Foundation, and the Friends of Kunsthalle Osnabrück.