SNOW
New Paintings by Dieter Mammel
16 January – 28 February 2026, Opening: 15 January, 6-9 p.m.

“SNOW”, Dieter Mammel’s first solo show at Galerie Poll, presents new paintings by the artist. Created since 2024, these works mark the beginning of a new chapter in Mammel’s artistic career.

After “LIFELINE” – a retrospective of one hundred paintings tracing personal and family stories over more than twenty years, presented at museums in Romania, Serbia, and Germany from May 2024 to January 2026 – Mammel’s latest paintings mark a shift: a move away from the human figure as the central subject.

The new series begins with a change in the painting surface: instead of the unprimed white canvas he previously used, Mammel turns to natural-coloured linen. On linen, the sketch-like application of ink on wet canvas that he has practiced for more than two decades does not produce the familiar, fluid washes of consistently monochrome colour.

In response, Mammel revisits a method he learned during his studies: priming the canvas with hide glue. The priming white becomes a defining visual element – spread like snow across the linen. Using cyan-coloured ink at first, later switching to black, Mammel paints his subjects with the priming white: huts, fences, mountains, rivers, and power lines. These motifs all share a sense of vast, often empty winter landscape, based on the artist’s childhood memories of the Swabian Alp.

Included in the exhibition is “The Others and I” (2024), the first painting created using this new technique. A fir forest appears in the upper left; a river winds through snow in the foreground and middle ground, disappearing on the horizon. As Mammel recalls, in his childhood imagination, the closely grouped trees were “the Others”, and he himself was the river.

These new paintings are characterized by empty areas and a reduction to black and white. In some areas, Mammel deliberately leaves the natural linen exposed. He dispenses with framing, allowing the image to extend beyond its edges.

Mammel began his artistic career with woodcuts, which led him to focus on light and shadow in his painting. With these new works, he returns to his roots.

Dieter Mammel, born in 1965 in Reutlingen, studied from 1986 to 1991 at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and the Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste), graduating as a master student. The Villa Serpentara fellowship from the Academy of Arts, Berlin (Akademie der Künste) took him to Italy in 1991 and 1993. From 1997 to 2002, he taught painting and art history at the Mediadesign Academy in Berlin. He received studio grants from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture in 1995 and 2000, the Karl Hofer Scholarship from 1998 to 2000, and a studio from the Frankfurt Department of Culture from 2007 to 2012. He lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main. His works are held in numerous private and public collections, including the Kupferstichkabinetten of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Göteborgs konstmuseum, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Mustafa Taviloglu Collection in Istanbul, the Joel Barish Collection in New York, and the Rémy Chemama Collection in Paris.