REBECCA BRODSKIS

For THE LAST ONES AWAKE, Brodskis turns her attention to those who became her chosen family in Berlin. The portraits that make up the exhibition depict close friends whose presence shaped the years she spent in the city, tracing a community bound less by circumstance than by shared vulnerability, ambition, and care.

Brodskis’ relationship with Berlin began long before she arrived. At eighteen, she found a copy of Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Lyric Novella abandoned on a street in France. Its evocation of Berlin in the 1930s opened an imaginary landscape that would remain with her for years. At a time when Berlin held little fascination for many in France, the city became, for her, an inevitable destination.

During the years she spent in Berlin in the mid-2000s, it was still a place where artists from around the world could build a life with very little. Cheap apartments, improvised studios, coal-heated flats, and the freedom afforded by limited means created the conditions for an unusually close-knit artistic community. Most had left their families behind. Many were barely in their twenties. In the absence of established roots, friendships acquired the weight of kinship.

The portraits in THE LAST ONES AWAKE are shaped by this experience. Rather than documenting a generation or a scene, Brodskis paints the quiet intensity of relationships forged through proximity and mutual dependence. Her oil-on-linen figures appear suspended in moments of introspection, their expressions resisting narrative while carrying the accumulated weight of shared histories. Each painting becomes less an individual likeness than a fragment of a collective memory.

The exhibition is, in many ways, an ode to a particular Berlin that no longer exists, not simply a city transformed by time, but a set of conditions that allowed strangers to become indispensable to one another. Without romanticising the past, Brodskis reflects on a fleeting moment when artistic life was inseparable from everyday endurance, and when friendship became the place where both could be sustained.

THE LAST ONES AWAKE is both a portrait of individuals and a portrait of a city remembered through those who inhabited it together. It is an ode to a community that, however temporary, continues to shape the artist’s understanding of belonging.