Berlin’s Bleibtreustraße 45 is now the stage for KAWS’s most candid cast of characters, catch them before they clock out on August 9.
Berlin’s summer art season has barely begun and already there’s a line outside Galerie Max Hetzler. Opening today, June 13, “Therapy” marks KAWS’s first partnership with the gallery and fills its two adjacent spaces with fresh work that toggles between street-wise irreverence and museum-ready polish.
KAWS’s beloved CHUM takes center frame across a suite of new paintings. The bubble-limbed figure appears again and again, outlined in crisp color yet hovering over speckled, spray-painted grounds that read like static on an analog screen. Some CHUMs hoist blank canvases, others teeter at cliff edges or sink under rising water, a serial meditation on the jitters of the present tense.
The show pivots around a single sculpture, SPACE (2023). Cast in stainless steel and installed at street level, COMPANION now wears a NASA-style suit, oxygen tank strapped on, visor lowered by its own gloved hands marked with the tell-tale XXs. It is a colossal figure of cosmic self-reflection, less superhero, more fellow traveler.
Across canvases and steel, KAWS keeps the mood unnervingly human: frustration, doubt, and cautious hope flicker beneath the cartoon gloss. Viewers might find themselves mirroring CHUM’s raised palms or COMPANION’s covered eyes, proof that the artist’s pop lexicon still cuts close to the bone.
“Therapy” runs until August 9, 2025, at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45 (with the monumental sculpture next door at 15/16). Admission is free; appointment is not.
