GROUP EXHIBITION

Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to present ‘Not Flat’, a group exhibition on view from September 9 to October 25, 2025. The exhibition features works by Justin Adian, Matthias Bitzer, Johan Creten, Gregor Hildebrandt, Alex Israel, Erik Lindman, Li Qing, Ryan Schneider, and Turi Simeti. In the mid-twentieth century, American critic Clement Greenberg defined modernist painting by its allegiance to “flatness”. For Greenberg, the medium’s strength lay in the affirmation of its own surface, in the refusal of illusion and the cultivation of a purely optical space. The picture plane was to be an arena for the eye, a zone stripped of sculptural depth, anchored in its two-dimensional nature. His thinking shaped the dominant formalist narrative of painting for decades, even as artists found ways to test its limits. Today, that legacy can be seen as absorbed into the atmosphere of daily life. Flatness is no longer an aesthetic provocation; it is now almost the default condition of images. The smooth plane is everywhere, from the glow of a phone screen to the facade of an electronic billboard in the subway station. The aesthetic of the screen – which is crisp, immaculate, without friction – has become the banner of “Superflat”. Once a challenge to Western pictorial depth, Superflat has migrated into the mainstream, becoming the visual lingua franca of digital culture. In this context, the radical gesture lies in putting into practice new ways of moving beyond the flat plane.