In his exhibition “thereafter,” Ian Waelder for the first time connects the façade, atrium, and arcade of the Kestner Gesellschaft into a spatial narrative between inside and outside, past and present. His works explore the limits of memory: familial traces, biographical breaks, everyday remnants—not as evidence, but as fragile carriers of a history that defies a linear narrative.

At the center of Waelder’s solo exhibition is a labyrinthine room made of cardboard, evoking associations with a moving box. The arcade’s offset entrance draws the eye away from obvious paths. Inside, sculptures, newspaper collages, a piano melody, and the material cardboard and light condense into a multi-layered collage—including a newspaper article covered in oat flakes and traces of butter entitled “Mercy,” a deformed shoe last with a porcelain-like nose titled Sprain (38) (2023), and molded insoles from the Bystander series (2025) with dangling shoelaces. These are traces of domestic routines that elude concrete memory and yet evoke a peculiarly familiar atmosphere.

At irregular intervals, a short piano melody sounds, introduced by the impact of falling drops of water. This sonic gesture points to a personal trace: memories of childhood melodies and the music of his grandfather currently accompany Waelder in his residency studio at the Laurenz-Haus Foundation in Basel, where he happened upon a piano and recorded a fragmentary melody. The artist, whose Jewish-German grandfather fled to Chile in 1939, weaves acoustic and material fragments into a poetics of remembering in which the incomplete takes shape.

On the facade, Self-portraits as my father’s nose (2025) – scaled-up nose sculptures made from seeds, created in collaboration with his father – wait to be eaten by pigeons and other birds. Their outlines could remain visible as fragile traces. In the Café Tender Buttons, a triptych of raw linen paintings shows a boy running, seemingly moving forward from the picture space as if in a cinematic time-lapse – a silent gesture of remembrance, like a cinematic look back into the past. Waelder’s use of materials and his works refuse clear legibility and temporality. They conceive memory not as reconstruction, but as a tentative movement along voids, displacements, and sedimented surfaces – where the absent is most strongly present.

Curated by: Alexander Wilmschen
Curatorial Assistant: Emilia Radmacher

We would like to express our sincere thanks to the artist and the galleries carlier | gebauer, Berlin / Madrid, and diez, Amsterdam.

Ian Waelder (born 1993 in Madrid) is a Spanish artist and publisher. He graduated in Fine Arts from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2023. His artistic work explores collective memory practices and personal history and encompasses a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, sound, found objects, printmaking, and spatial installations. Ian Waelder currently lives and works between his hometown of Mallorca, Frankfurt am Main, and Basel.

Waelder has received numerous awards, including the HAP – Hessian Studio Program – basis Frankfurt am Main (2025), the 2023/24 DZ Bank Art Foundation scholarship, the residency at the WIELS Center for Contemporary Art (2024), the Portikus Graduate Prize (2023), and the Art Nou Prize of the Galleries for Contemporary Art in Barcelona (2022). His work has been presented internationally in numerous solo exhibitions, including thereafter (Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, 2025) and cadence (carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2025). His group exhibitions include Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2025), I Opened the Curtain to See What Lays Behind (carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2024), A=A, B=B (Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona, ​​2023), Balusters (Francis Irv, New York, 2023).