This summer, L’Atlas invited Stallmann Galleries (Berlin) for a residency by Ukrainian artist Daniel Spivakov.
Embracing this unique context, he has chosen to create his works in situ, investigating how the spatial qualities of the venue can inform both the creative process and the resulting exhibition.
Fuck Off & Other Notes On Mortality is Daniel Spivakov’s first solo exhibition in France.
For two months, Daniel Spivakov transformed L’Atlas into his studio, dismantling and reassembling fragments of his monumental paintings until they revealed completely new forms.
As usual in his practice, Spivakov begins with printed images. For the first time, they are his own—scans of his hands, bedsheets and face, captured through the flat eye of a home printer. Enlarged on vinyl and polyester, these distorted impressions lean toward the grandeur of classical painting, only to be unsettled again. Over them, Spivakov paints—veils of white, flashes of magenta, and his portrait—marks that flicker between abstraction and figure. The hands soon take over: restless, searching, echoing one another across the surface.
Throughout art history, hands have carried meaning as deeply as faces: Christ raising his fingers in blessing, Caravaggio’s charged gestures in the Louvre. They are symbols, but also truths. Spivakov returns to them not to repeat tradition but to pull it apart, to reassemble it outside of style and code, closer to the human pulse. The result is a body of work that compresses history into the present. It crosses through painting’s past with irreverence and care, while asking what remains when all else is stripped away.
Somehow playfully, Daniel reminds us that hands, above all, don’t lie.
About Stallmann
Stallmann Galleries in Berlin stands for a radically contemporary approach to presenting art. Founded by Lina Stallmann, the gallery serves as a platform for international emerging artists who challenge the status quo and search for new directions for the art of tomorrow. A clear thread runs through the program: Stallmann focuses on young artists and offers many of them their first solo exhibitions. The aim isn’t to celebrate innovation for its own sake — instead, the gallery seeks to present works that ask questions about the future of art itself. The artists exhibiting here actively engage with what might happen to art tomorrow, searching for forms of expression that surprise and reveal something not seen before.