Soft Embers of Becoming (Upcoming)
Gallery Hayashi + Art Bridge, Tokyo, JP, 28 March - 28 April 2026
GALLERY HAYASHI + ART BRIDGE is delighted to present Soft Embers of Becoming, a solo exhibition by Leipzig-based artist Raffael Bader. Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, the show inaugurates a collaboration between GALLERY HAYASHI + ART BRIDGE and Enari Gallery, Amsterdam. The show will be on view from 28th February to 28th March 2026.
In the new body of work, Raffael Bader investigates states of quiet transformation that unfold beneath the visible surface of things. His paintings are guided by the conviction that what is commonly perceived as still, inert, or lifeless is in fact permeated by subtle movement. Rather than depicting moments of extreme rupture or dramatic change, Bader turns toward processes of slow ignition — a latent warmth, comparable to embers resting within wood, already present and patiently unfolding.
Bader approaches painting as a space in which forms remain attentive and porous. Colour, texture, and gesture sometimes come to the fore loudly, and sometimes they recede, remaining vague, they listen, accumulate, and breathe. In these compositions, the elements seem to hover between material presence and inner vitality, suggesting that each form carries within it its own degree of hardness or alertness. Becoming is not staged as a dramatic event, even though there are works that erupt more strongly, but rather as a continuous, gentle persistence.
Soft Embers of Becoming proposes a view of matter as animated and responsive. There is no absolute stillness, no dead matter — only shifting intensities of awareness. In Bader’s paintings, life sometimes bursts forth directly, sometimes it glows gently, inviting the viewer to attune themselves to the quiet rhythms that shape existence from within.
→ Gallery Hayashi + Art Bridge
Feral Within
Fred Levine Gallery, Bruton, UK, 13 September - 8 November 2025
Bader brings together new work that explore what he explains as a search for a hidden yet an always present, inner wilderness.
Bader’s paintings are grounded in a deeply personal inquiry: the search for a world that lies beneath the highly developed rational mind- a space of untamed potential, raw emotion, and archaic freedom. Working with natural phenomena that are both within us and around us, his art becomes a site for tracing connections between the feral self and the living landscape.
"It’s a questioning," Bader reflects, "but it’s also an act of doing something inherently abstract as painting always is, to sense the wild that lies within me, I want the nature of painting itself to remain visible in the work. The paint represents itself, while also pointing beyond itself. Both perspectives are real, both are legitimate."
The exhibition features works such as Lavender at the Edge of the World, a meditation on resilience and beauty in unexpected places. Here, beauty is not merely ornamental; it’s an emergent force at the threshold between safety and the abyss. In the work titled, In the End the Bush Burns Down V, fire is a symbol of transformation - a consuming, nonjudgmental energy that destroys to prepare the ground for something new.
Across these works, Bader invites viewers to consider the landscapes we carry within us: fertile, chaotic, and vivid inner worlds shaped by emotion, memory, and nature itself. His compositions oscillate between stillness and movement, figuration and abstraction, evoking forests, oceans, mountains, and the shifting light of imagined places.
"We all carry an inner garden, an inner landscape," Bader says. "It’s brutal and beautiful at once. The wilderness is there, in us, in every person, in every place"
Traverse Heights Right to the Edges
Yiri Arts, Taipei, TW, 24 April - 17 May 2025
What Do the Edges in Raffael Bader’s Paintings Signify?
Text by Sid Chen
In his first solo exhibition in Taiwan, Traverse Heights Right to the Edges, Leipzig-based artist Raffael Bader (b. 1987) presents over a dozen recent paintings that introduce a distinctive visual language, rarely seen in the local scene, through his use of color, spatial depth, brushwork, and layering. Some compositions retain traces of traditional structures, while others blur the boundaries between hues and textures, forming camouflage-like surfaces. These formal choices reflect Bader’s unique approach to color. Rather than relying on contrast or harmony in the conventional sense, he treats color as a medium for emotional and perceptual exploration. Through spatial disjunctions and layered planes, Bader reconstructs the relationship between humanity and the natural world. This exhibition not only showcases his painterly vocabulary but also reveals his ongoing inquiry into landscape, memory, and perception.
The exhibition’s title, Traverse Heights Right to the Edges, may allude to the artist’s practice of walking between towns and mountains in search of inspiration. But it also hints at the "polychromatic ambiguity" he cultivates, a sensibility that challenges conventional notions of order and coherence within painting. Although Bader begins with the motif of landscape, his work is never bound by representation. He has described his process as beginning with intuitive sketches that gradually evolve into layered compositions using oil paint, water-soluble media, and oil sticks. He balances transparency with density, allowing colors to expand freely while still maintaining harmony within the space of the canvas. This delicate interplay results in an openness, a sense of lightness and breath that infuses his paintings.
At the heart of the exhibition is Bader’s subtle and experimental understanding of color. Rather than assigning emotional value to individual swaths of paint, he allows pigments to flow and intertwine across the canvas, producing camouflage-like patterns that give form to his notion of "polychromatic ambiguity." This idea is as conceptual as it is visual. When observing nature, Bader first notices familiar tones, only to find, upon closer inspection, a complex array of unexpected shades. He invites viewers to experience a similar perceptual shift, from immediate recognition to a deeper and more ineffable emotional resonance.
This way of seeing also informs Bader’s reflections on landscape. His practice of wandering between city and forest provides a foundation, but his paintings are not literal transcriptions of scenery. Instead, they undergo an abstracting process that dissolves visual boundaries and structural clarity. In this approach lies a quiet dialectic between order and chaos. Rather than imposing compositional control, Bader seeks moments of harmony within the flux. His works remain in a state of visual openness, where resolution is neither the aim nor the end.
The titles of his paintings, such as Fog on the Cedar Hill, Floating Clouds High Up, and Followed the Path to the Edge, point toward tangible experiences of nature while also carrying symbolic meaning. Within this poetic framework, viewers may find resonances with the aesthetics of East Asian landscape painting, particularly in the way Bader captures the rhythms of the natural world rather than its outward appearance. Though based in Europe, his philosophy parallels the traditional Chinese notion of following nature, an attitude that values the depiction of energy, movement, and emotional intuition over realistic form.
Bader’s process deliberately embraces uncertainty. He lets the materials move and merge across the surface, relinquishing predetermined structure in favor of a dialogue with color, emotion, and time. As a result, his canvases often dwell in a liminal zone. They resemble landscapes, but they also feel like records of internal fluctuation. The “heights” he refers to are not only physical terrains but also pathways of thought and sensation. The “edges” are points where established frameworks are questioned or even dissolved. This duality lies at the core of Traverse Heights Right to the Edges.
To categorize Bader’s work as either abstract or figurative would be to overlook its complexity. Although trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Bader does not simply continue the narrative logic of the New Leipzig School with its emphasis on figuration. Instead, he traverses this artistic terrain to forge a path uniquely his own. It may twist and turn or drift into mist, yet in this very ambiguity and exploration, he articulates a visual language that is distinctly his, inviting viewers to journey with him through a space where sensation and reflection converge.
Luminous Floating
Enari Gallery, Amsterdam, NL, 25 October - 01 December 2024
This new body of work reflects a leap further into Bader's study of light, its fleeting properties, and its relationship to nature and human perception. The exhibition title indicates the series' central theme: how light "hovers" and "floats" through space and time, touching everything without prejudice while modifying how it is seen. The concept of floating implies a weightless, suspended condition, which reflects the delicate and elusive character of light in Bader's work.
In this exhibition, light carries a literal and symbolic meaning. It shines and infuses every surface, scene, and memory, leading viewers through landscapes that alternate between tangible and ambiguous. Some of Bader's paintings, inspired by his month-long stay in the Scottish Lowlands, are deeply rooted in the region's natural environment. During his stay, Bader immersed himself in the estate's wildlife, plants, and running streams, letting the mystical characteristics of the location permeate his work. These concrete motifs are infused with light, but Bader lowers their sharpness, allowing the enchanting ambience to blur the line between the physical and the otherworldly.
However, the artist moves beyond the actual terrain, with some pieces relying on bits of recollection rather than direct observation. In these paintings, light is a vessel for memory's transient and fragmentary nature in these paintings. Bader utilises this interaction to reflect on his place in the world—how it evolves, how desires and needs vary, and how the human experience navigates the tension between permanence and impermanence. Bader uses this to explore broader themes regarding humanity's relationship with nature and the artificial barriers that separate them. In his paintings, light is used as a symbol for transcending these divisions, implying the potential of a more integrated and harmonious perspective of humanity as a part of nature.
Enigmatic Stream
Galerie Philipp Anders, Leipzig, DE, 7 June - 13 July 2024
Raffael Bader paints landscapes in which seeing, feeling and representation blend in to create something new that stimulates the imagination. He once told me that very often he creates a painting he would like to see himself at this very moment. During his travels, Raffael fills numerous notebooks with drawings of landscapes and their elements such as plants and other details. For his landscape paintings (of various dimensions) he uses oil paint and oil crayons resulting into richly textured compositions with sometimes delicately thin layering or at other times urgent brushstrokes of a color palette which is not afraid of tender pastel hues and stark contrasts. His compositions represent a poetic idea of shifts between recognition, spatial or imaginary openness, dreamlike con-figurations and contradicting formations. The paintings appear almost as a longing desire towards the landscapes which Raffael depicts, to engage and move within what’s presenting itself before the eye.
Walk in Sizzling Air
Contemporary Art Foundation Tokyo, JP, 25 August - 22 September 2023
The Contemporary Art Foundation is pleased to present the collection exhibition "Raffael Bader: Walk in Sizzling Air" from August 25 to September 22, 2023. This will be Rafael Bader's first solo exhibition in Japan.
Raffael Bader's paintings are characterized by semi-abstract compositions inspired primarily by natural landscapes. The artist focuses on the connection between the natural environment and human emotions, creating images that are both flat and possess depth through layers of paint of varying thickness and different textures. Viewers of Bader's works experience the sensation of witnessing the artist's immersion in a natural environment, as he integrates his mind with the outside world.
Born in 1987, Bader graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (Germany) in 2019 and has continued to live and work in Leipzig since. He has exhibited in numerous countries around the world, including Germany, the UK, Switzerland, the US, and Japan. The artist's work was added to the collection of Yusaku Maezawa, founder and chairman of the foundation, in 2022. This exhibition will feature the first public showing of approximately 10 paintings from the collection in Japan.
→ Contemporary Art Foundation Tokyo