MANUEL FRATTINI | The Landscape of Painting

18.04.-20.09.2026 at Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst im Glaspalast | H2-Kabinette

Opening | Fri 17.04.2026 | 6:00 pm

Initiated and supported by the Arno Buchegger Foundation, Augsburg, the Center for Contemporary Art is dedicating an exhibition in the cabinets of »H2«  to the Freiburg-based artist Manuel Frattini.

Frattini’s work embraces the unspectacular yet radically earnest nature of painting that is rooted in seeing. His art thrives on the sensual presence of colour and gesture. Filtered and condensed, the external world appears in his images as abstracted memory. Each work thus becomes an embodiment of seeing in the process of painting.

Thick oil paint on canvas, wood, or glass, fluid gouache and ink, coloured pencil on paper: nets, grids, and linear weaves layered over coloured grounds open finely spun pictorial spaces. Fragments of reduced figuration and nuanced colour fields point toward the visible, which merges with memories and associations. In this openness, the works appear at once approachable and fragile. They emphasize the real time of their creation—tangible in the material’s substance and in the traces of paint application.

For the cabinets of H2, Frattini has developed a spatially expansive installation. His paintings are set into a rhythmic interplay of distance and proximity, opening dialogues and binding the gaze to movement within the room. Like a score of notes and pauses, the exhibition unfolds as a composition that only fully reveals itself through walking and looking. In the intervals and empty spaces, a resonance of the absent emerges—a »landscape of painting« that links the familiar with the unfamiliar.

In an age of image overload and digital overlays, Frattini advocates attentiveness to the individual, the moment, the quiet resistance of the material. His »landscape of painting« is not an escape, but an invitation to rediscover the world through the act of seeing.

The exhibition is curated by Wolfgang Reichert in close collaboration with the artist. A publication will accompany the show.

The exhibition opens on Friday, April 17, 2026 at 6:00 pm, simultaneously with the exhibition »SHIFT OF VISION | New Paths of Abstraction«.
The artist will be present. Registration is not required—you are warmly welcome!