Galerie Buchholz is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Sergej Jensen. Beginning in the early-2000s Jensen became well known for so-called “painting without paint,” creating abstractions using found textiles and their ancillary marks. Jensen’s spare, expansive works were said to avoid all signs of willful expression, forgoing painterly gesture for apparently received forms. This year Jensen debuted a new body of work conspicuous for seeming to break with his signature style. In his exhibition at Galerie Buchholz figures suggesting Renaissance, Romantic or proto-Modernist sources are rendered with a technique resembling tempera or fresco painting, using translucent pigment applied thinly in many layers. On inspection the solemn scenes depicted hint at having been patched together from diverse materials – a Northern Renaissance head, in one example, joined to an 18th-century British torso. As with Jensen’s sewn abstractions this new body of work invokes a tradition of high painting, adopting its conventions but setting apart or emptying out its symbolic or expressive ambitions.