servusparadies – how's it going?
June 26, 2026 – July 31, 2026
Willi Bucher
Gallery 3AP
Building on the exhibition *Metamorphosis* (2024) in Düsseldorf, which featured works from Willi Bucher’s “yellow” series, the current exhibition continues the dialogue begun there and focuses on the *Sprachlandschaften* series as well as on works in which painting, language, and space interpenetrate one another.
The focus is on the diptych “servusparadies – wie geht’s?” from the series *Sprachlandschaften* (Language Landscapes), which has been in development since the 1990s. Bucher combines painting and printmaking to create multi-layered pictorial surfaces on which language is seen rather than read. Words become traces, rhythms, and pictorial structures. Between Concrete Poetry and painting, pictorial spaces open up in which language becomes a landscape and the image becomes a catalyst for associations and ideas.
The work “Untitled” from the yellow series transforms color itself into an event. In numerous layers of paint applied one on top of the other, time condenses into a visible process. The exposed strip of the painting’s support does not signify completion, but rather the history of painting itself.
Another focal point is the painting “Heroically Hopeless,” which explores the motif of walking and striding. The question posed in the title of the diptych—“servusparadies – how’s it going?”—takes on an additional layer of meaning here: it is not only about one’s state of being, but also about walking itself—as movement, a setting out, and a way of experiencing the world. With the exhortation “Go and open the door,” the Czech poet and physician Miroslav Holub articulates an attitude that also permeates Bucher’s work. Paradise does not appear here as an attainable place, but as something that unfolds only in the act of being on the move, in seeing, and in thinking.
For decades, Willi Bucher has been combining painting, language, and digital image-making processes. As early as the 1990s, he was exploring the interplay between analog painting and digital thinking—not as a technical experiment, but as an investigation into the conditions under which images emerge, generate meaning, and shape our perception. In a present where digital imagery increasingly shapes our view of the world, these questions have taken on new relevance.
With the beboxx objects and the video work “Putzkonzert” installed in the air-raid shelter, Bucher extends these questions into the space. Wiping appears as an act that straddles the line between revealing and erasing, between cleansing and dissolution. The former air-raid shelter serves as the antithesis to the open gallery space and condenses the motif of paradise into a place of the imagination: a space between redemption and loss, in which images, meanings, and certainties are in a state of constant flux. Two projections onto glass blocks and a white screen take up the theme of white. Light becomes a medium for images, and white a poetic space of possibility: a projection surface for purity, transition, and the ephemeral.
Thus, paradise does not appear as a place that can be reached, but rather as an open space for thought and perception. The exhibition views painting as a medium of seeing and thinking, as well as an invitation to slow down one’s gaze and, in the act of viewing, to continually discover new relationships between image, language, and space.
Exhibition view of “servusparadies – wie geht’s?” – Willi Bucher. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie 3AP am Main.
Galerie 3AP
Brückenstraße 76,
, 60594 Frankfurt am Main
Email: mail@galerie-3ap.de