Galerie Poll Berlin
Exhibitions
Of time and flow
Jan Schüler
24 April – 6 June 2026, Opening: 23 April, 6-9 p.m.
With “Of Time and the River”, Jan Schüler presents new works from the past four years – continuing his German Landscape series, in which he explores towns and landscapes bound up not only with German history, but also with personal memory and his own biography.
Following his views of Berlin and the histories they evoke, the Hessian landscapes of his childhood, and the Rhineland motifs of his adopted home of Düsseldorf, the painter has now turned his attention to Dresden and the landscapes along the Elbe. In doing so, Schüler follows in the footsteps of two admired predecessors: Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) and Egon Pukall (1934–1989).
Both lived and painted in Dresden, and both are buried there. In solitude and silence, Jan Schüler sets out on walks through the city and along the Elbe as far as the cliffs and gorges of Saxon Switzerland, always searching for places he knows from paintings by these masters. Once he finds them, he deliberately adopts a different perspective and alters the composition. “Dresden: View from Pillnitz Palace towards the Island in the Elbe” and “Dresden: The Elbe Ferry near Pillnitz” (both 2025) bear witness to such places discovered on foot – as do “Eldena Abbey Ruins on the Baltic Sea” (2024) and “Dresden: View from the Ostra Floodplain” (2026).
“What matters to me just as much as the paintings are the walks that precede them, in which I experience the landscape and almost merge with it, joining myself to the horizon through sight. All the works are bound up with bidding adieu and a longing for fusion and dissolution”, says Jan Schüler.
His painting is characterised by smooth surfaces and sharply delineated forms and planes rendered in cool, luminous colours. Beginning with photographs he takes on his excursions, he rigorously executes a reduction on canvas. In architecture as in natural settings, details recede: trees and clouds, ships and buoys, buildings and bridges are all strongly formalised, while people and animals are excluded from the composition. Whether viewers confront the abysses and hidden dangers beneath this perfect surface, or simply surrender to its beauty, is left to them.
The exhibition title is taken from Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel “Of Time and the River” (1935), which recounts the young Eugene Gant’s search for fulfilment, love, and identity at Harvard, in New York, and in Europe during the 1920s.Jan Schüler, born in 1963 in Gießen, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1985 to 1993 under Rissa and as a master student under Fritz Schwegler. In 1996 he received the Sponsorship Prize for Fine Art from the city of Düsseldorf, where he lives and works to this day. His work can be found in numerous public and private collections throughout Germany and Austria. Together with the Poll Art Foundation, where he has been a member of the advisory board since 2013, Jan Schüler published the first inventory catalogue of paintings and drawings by Maina-Miriam Munsky (1943–1999). During winter semester 2022/2023, he held a visiting professorship at the University of Fine Arts Münster (in the class of Cornelius Völker).