April 5th to May 3rd, 2025

Monte Clark is pleased to present The Kasino, an exhibition of new paintings by Holger Kalberg. 

Holger Kalberg’s latest body of work is shaped by an engagement with uncertainty and the act of storytelling. These paintings navigate the liminal space between construction and deconstruction, where imagery is not fixed but emerges through a process of continual revision. Kalberg’s method is one of accumulation and erasure—painterly languages, historical and contemporary references, and disparate genres are layered, obscured, and reconfigured, revealing glimpses of previous iterations. Through the recursive acts of overpainting, scraping, and reworking, the paintings resist resolution, instead embodying an ongoing negotiation of form and meaning. Chance and error are integral to this process, destabilizing authorial control and allowing for unanticipated visual structures to surface. In doing so, Kalberg’s work engages with broader questions of temporality, material agency, and the mutable nature of representation.

Rooted in both personal history and broader global currents, Kalberg’s paintings frequently depict figures in states of interaction or introspection. Portraiture, narrative fragments, and domestic interiors coalesce from an array of source materials, ranging from familial archives to contemporary socio-political imagery. These works inhabit a paradoxical temporal register—at once retrospective and forward-looking—both in their stylistic approach and in their engagement with subject matter. By foregrounding process over resolution, The Kasino positions painting as a site of perpetual becoming, where the past and present, the deliberate and the accidental, continually intersect.