Dominik Lejman: Phantoms

The first major exhibition of the Polish artist Dominik Lejman will open on January 9, 2026 at St. Matthew's Church.  Since almost three decades Dominik Lejman projects video images onto abstract paintings. Moving and motionless elements come together at different times. The paintings are briefly inhabited by revenants, phantoms—a disturbing art of alignment, imprisonment, and fall. 

In Dominik Lejman's art, people fall out of time into the joints of a present—a paradox. They are phantoms, belonging to no time, but recurring in every time. Thus, viewing his pictures is like an apparition in which the ambivalence of the familiar and the uncanny is revealed; imprisonment and paradisiacal longing. “The time is out of joint,” says the ghost to Hamlet.

Dominik Lejman's work is obsessive, its aesthetics following the movement of human existence, its orientation, with a careful mixture of doubt, humor, and despair. His work swings like a pendulum between revelation and repulsion, elevation and fall, Elysium and dungeon. Unique in his combination of content, media transmission, and aesthetics, Dominik Lejman has shaped the question of the possible in the absurd. 

To be haunted by phantoms means remembering something we have never experienced in the present. All the more so, Dominik Lejman's work asks us how we are to deal with our presence, our time, and with what responsibility. What is the sequence of time? Where and how do times border on each other? In Henry James's story, The Turn of the Screw (1898), it says disturbingly: “The presence before him was a presence.” The “hauntology”, the question of the present as phantom or spectrality, set by Jacques Derrida in the 70s may be equally need and desire of our times now.

The exhibition is curated by Hubertus von Amelunxen

Dominik Lejman (born 1969) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and at the Royal College of Art in London. As part of a generation that actively participated in political change in Eastern Europe, his innovative approach to painting first gained widespread recognition in 1999 at the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe (Ludwig Muzéum, Budapest; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm). Lejman combines painting with video projections, creating video wall paintings and large-format projection works. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and is the author of many public projects (e.g., permanent installations in hospitals in New York and Cleveland). He has also participated in many group exhibitions, e.g., in 2004 at the Architecture Biennale in Venice, in 2019 at Sanguine at the Fondazione Prada, and in 2022 at Macht! Licht! at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. His latest retrospective solo exhibition, Air Wants to Go, took place in 2020 at OPENHEIM in Wrocław. Lejman's solo exhibition Lunatics was shown during the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 at the Madnicity Pavilion on the island of San Servolo. He is the recipient of Polish and international awards, including the Paszport Polityki Award (2001) and the Berlin Art Prize (2018). He is a professor at the II Painting Studio at the University of Arts in Poznań, Poland. He lives and works in Poznań and Berlin.

Dominik Lejman: Phantoms with art works created over the last 20 years, is accompanied by an extensive program of events including readings, choreographies, performances, and lectures. All events begin on Tuesday at 7pm and are free of charge.

January 13, 2025
Phantoms    
Ulrich Loock, Anda Rottenberg, and Hannes Langbein in conversation with Dominik Lejman. Moderated by Hubertus v. Amelunxen

January 20, 2025
Veil  
Maria Colusi (performance)

January 27, 2025    
The Chess Player
Reading of poems and prose texts by Howard Altman and Zbigniew Herbert with Howard Altman, Michael Krüger, and Grzegorz Małecki (in the original and in German translation)

February 3, 2025 
Ubu
Krzysztof “Leon” Diemaszkiewicz (performance)

February 10, 2025     
Ghost Sound
Concert by Mikolaj Trzaska

For over 20 years, St. Matthew's Church in Berlin has been hosting exhibitions of contemporary art by Edith Dekyndt, Gilbert & George, Leiko Ikemura, Berta Fischer, Jakob Mattner, Michael Anthony Müller, Gregor Schneider and many others. Art is at the heart of the church’s community, facing the New National Gallery, the Kulturforum Berlin, and the upcoming “berlin modern” museum.