Leaving Room | creational text Hadassa Cohen
The title of the exhibition, Leaving Room, articulates a twilight zone between the longing for a sense of home and rootedness, and departure and emptiness. The exhibition has its roots in an old photograph of the artist’s great-grandfather, a priest in Hamburg, walking in a religious procession. This figure gave rise to the hooded figures that inhabit the space—figures standing on the threshold between pilgrimage and exile, between despair and surrender. These figures engage in a dialogue with the heavy pictorial symbols deployed by Neuhaus, including a black sun, deep pools, tunnels, and architectural structures, prompting the question of whether these are landscapes of the apocalypse or perhaps portals to a spiritual revelation.
Neuhaus proposes a space of gathering and encounter between elements that function as generators of space. Through slender constructions, he physically connects the paintings to the sculptures and shapes the boundaries of viewing. A series of paintings on wooden surfaces stands opposite a series of tall, gaunt sculptures, bent beneath the weight of their materials. While the paintings unfold visions of architectural labyrinths and industrial spaces enveloped in a mysterious aura, the sculptures stand as silent presences, their hoods concealing their inner essence.
Many of Neuhaus’s works rely on perceptual disruption and strategies of material camouflage. Through his use of materials, he examines the stability of the object and its relationship to its surroundings, creating a sophisticated reversal of roles: linoleum is sewn into a metallic rigidity; iron is worked with a textile-like fluidity; and glossy lacquered wood surfaces recall oil brushstrokes on canvas. The works establish a space in which the fixed loses its grip on reality, transforming the exhibition into a conceptual terrain for examining the fragility of stability. The destabilization of visual and material identification produces a fluid, precarious space belonging to a slightly different reality.
This gesture evokes Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia”—those other spaces that exist outside everyday reality while responding to it. As sites of limit experiences that unsettle the given order, heterotopias function as mirrors, bringing the real into contact with human fantasy. They move between desire and coercion, between freedom and control, inviting us to consider every place as a constantly shifting constellation of time and space. The body of work in the exhibition holds onto familiar forms and, through acts of assembly, transforms them into a mythical realm that offers shelter to the anomalous as well.
Neuhaus unfolds urban wastelands in which painting and sculpture engage in a dialogue of shadow and reflection. One example is a photograph of the Sea of Galilee, in which the artist places flat metal silhouettes resembling trees within the waters of the lake. In the photograph, nature appears as an anomalous and poetic metallic presence. Similarly, the sculptures in the exhibition function as a community of nomads, immersed in a constant movement of thought. Both evoke a longing for moments of grace within a fragmented space, and a yearning for solid ground that, more often than not, remains unattainable.