Christian Schwarzwald
ROAM
11.07.– 28.08.2025
Fichtebunker, Fichtestraße 6, 10967 Berlin, Germany
☞Installation Views
☞Exhibition Portfolio
ROAM is Christian Schwarzwald’s third solo exhibition at Galerie EBENSPERGER, once
again exploring an expanded understanding of drawing. At its core lies the question of
drawing’s lexicon-like quality as a form of sign-making — and how images, language, and
music can be translated into visual codes.
In this presentation, developed specifically for the Fichtebunker, Schwarzwald uses drawing
as a means of roaming — intellectually, spatially, and visually. Lines, patterns, and symbols
form cartographic systems that oscillate between orientation and disorientation. His works
construct a complex framework that functions like a visual instrument for navigating the
unknown. In Schwarzwald’s hands, drawing becomes a medium of exploration — a tool for
traversing the world through sensing and tracing.
ROAM centers on the coded nature of drawing and asks how visual perception can be
structured, stored, and communicated. Schwarzwald examines how drawing can evolve into a
visual language that transcends mere representation. The exhibition also explores transitions:
between analog and digital images, between original and reproduction, between paper and
pixel, line and code. These dualities are reflected both in the exhibition’s title and in the formal
structures of the works.
Traditionally, Schwarzwald has used color decoratively, in line with the logic of graphic arts. In
his latest works, however, an intense blue permeates the rooms of the Fichtebunker —
opening up associations with immateriality, vastness, and infinity. Blue becomes a symbol of
spatiality, a way to translate digital, abstract, or immaterial concepts into visual form.
At times free and expressive, at times rigorously geometric, Schwarzwald’s drawings are part
of a complex sign system. They form the core of a practice that approaches drawing as
language. His process includes quick sketches, notes, editions, paintings, and expansive
spatial works — concrete fragments of a larger, repeating pattern. Through the interplay of
these diverse techniques and media, drawing becomes an image that gestures beyond itself
— an attempt to approach the unspeakable and the unknown.
As part of the exhibition — and especially during the final book presentation of the forthcoming
publication ROAM, to be released in 2025 by permanent verlag/maer press — Schwarzwald’s
notion of drawing as a visual system will be further developed.
ROAM is an invitation to reflect on the practical and theoretical dimensions of art, image, and
sign — and to embark on a journey of discovery through the vast terrain of drawing. Between
line and system, sign and gesture, a space unfolds where the visual becomes a mode of
thinking and the familiar becomes newly legible in the unknown.