Andi Fischer: Feil Good

Gallery Baton is pleased to presents 《Feil Good》, a solo exhibition by German artist Andi Fischer (b. 1987), from 4 March to 11 April 2026. Rooted in the tradition of Art Brut, Andi Fischer has developed a singular pictorial language that absorbs and transforms the intrinsic qualities of the animal world into complex, inventive form. The exhibition presents new paintings and bronze sculptures in which birds and serpents are mainly rendered with characteristic dynamism—works that appropriate classical references only to loosen and subvert their underlying structures, reopening the question of how traditional narrative relates to the possibilities of contemporary painting.

Fischer's trademark approach unfolds on rarely primed white canvas, where primary-colored, planar images are built up in oil stick and pencil through a process of sustained improvisation. The negative space that occupies much of the picture plane carries equal pictorial weight to the figures themselves—a position in direct opposition to the Western convention that equates the void with incompletion. As in music, where silence is not absence but condition, Fischer treats empty space as the structuring force through which hierarchy, tension, and narrative become possible. In "NO PROBLEM PRESENT” (2025), a crocodile and a serpent share the canvas: the unprimed ground lifts and isolates the crocodile's raised forelimbs and torso, amplifying an atmosphere of unexpected intimacy with the grinning snake above. 
            
Fischer's sustained engagement with Art Brut—despite a rigorous institutional training—is driven by a will to demythologize the heroic conventions of Western pictorial tradition. In the canonical imagery of the hunt or the pastoral, animals occupy a fixed position: subordinate, dominated, rendered in the service of human narrative. Fischer inverts this order. Heroic composition and anatomical fidelity are deliberately stripped away; attention shifts instead to the nature of relations as they actually exist among animals—coexistence and opposition, hierarchy, and the unpredictable contingency of encounter. The deliberate asymmetry of Fischer's compositions and the willful distortion of scale constitute a formal subversion. Together with the re-centering of animals as narrative subjects, they propose a productive dismantling of the Western allegorical tradition—and through it, a renewed set of possibilities for painting today. 

The exhibition's title, 《Feil Good》 reads as a candid reflection on a practice sustained over years. A rarely primed white canvas does not permit revision or erasure; flawless resolution is, by definition, foreclosed. Fischer accepts this condition, treating the inevitable error not as failure but as generative force—something to be absorbed, ultimately, into the work itself. Mistakes blur the legibility of the picture surface and obscure the causal relationships between depicted forms, producing what the artist calls an in-between space: a condition of openness that is not incidental but structural. In "TENSION NOTICEABLE” (2025), a crow and a serpent rest together on a single branch; in "AHA HAPPY THERE GRASS" (2026), a tiger lies at ease beneath moonlight. Neither image resolves into a single reading. The endings remain open—unstable, resistant to the clean division of success and failure—and in that resistance, genuinely open to whatever the viewer brings.

Andi Fischer is a Berlin-based artist who received early recognition in European contemporary art scene with the prestigious TOY Berlin Masters Award after his graduate from the Universität der Künste in Berlin in 2018. He has participated in group exhibitions at Museum Bensheim (2022, Germany) and Kunstverein Ulm (2020, Germany). His works are included in the collections of Blanca and Boja Thyssen - Bornemisza Collection, Burger Collection, Fundación AMMA and Hildebrand Collection.