WITALIJ FRESE
CONTROL/COLLAPSE

In his current solo exhibition, Witalij Frese condenses the human body into an ensemble of fragile, fragmented states oscillating between order and disintegration. Limbs, torsos, serial casts, and vessel forms emerge as elements of a system that strives for structure while inevitably exposing its own fragility. Control/Collapse does not describe a completed condition, but rather a field of perpetual displacement in which stability appears only as a provisional form, revocable at any moment.

 

At the center of the exhibition is the body as a divisible, reconfigurable entity. Legs, arms, fingers, backs, and feet appear not as parts of an integral whole, but as displaceable, isolable, and serially organized elements. In doing so, Frese consistently extends his engagement with the formal vocabulary of antiquity, while radically detaching it from the ideal of the closed, flawless body. In place of heroic full figures, he presents partial bodies that are shifted, recombined, or deliberately left incomplete. Antiquity thus appears not as a harmonious model, but as a reservoir of images whose structural and ideological premises Frese subjects to critical scrutiny.

 

One leg sculpture, Control/Collapse I (2026), arches across a plinth; a second, Control/Collapse II (2026), hangs in isolation on the wall. Both works evoke a state of precarious balance: held, yet unsecured; supported, yet at the same time exposed to the possibility of falling. The arms in Ergebung (Submisson) (2026) physically and gesturally appropriate part of the architecture, while their ends are fixed to the wall by chains. The back fragment of a torso, Aufgehalten (Held Back) (2026), hovers just above the floor, as though its movement had been arrested without ever fully coming to rest. The finger-vases, among them Fragmentation (2026), move between sculpture and functional object. They form a system of openings in which support and leakage, containment and permeability, intersect: the body appears as a vessel that can never be fully sealed.

 

Chains, grids, and serial repetition function throughout the exhibition as instrumental forms of control. They fix, structure, and hold things in place. At the same time, they generate dependency, tension, and vulnerability. Stability here appears not as an inherent quality of the body, but as the result of external intervention—as an enforced equilibrium that may tip at any moment. The torso suspended from chains in Aufgehalten embodies this state of suspension with particular acuity: it seems to hang, glide, and fall all at once. Collapse is not enacted, but deferred into a condition of permanent delay.

 

The work Ergebung condenses this ambivalence into a silent, arresting gesture. The arms are at once raised and surrendered, supported and bound. Here, the body becomes a site onto which opposing forces are projected: between protection and discipline, self-empowerment and external control. The Armschleife in the window shifts this constellation into the threshold between inside and outside. There, the body becomes a transitional form, the contour of an in-between that appears equally exposed and withdrawn.

 

With the large relief Shared Wound (2023) and the series re-formations (2026), the focus shifts from the singular fragment to the body’s serial inscription. At first, the monochrome re-formations reliefs appear with marked restraint, yet upon closer viewing they activate a tactile visual memory. The body is not represented here as a figure, but becomes perceptible as trace, impression, and negative form. The series reads as an attempt to secure corporeality through repetition; it is precisely through this strategy, however, that its instability becomes visible. Each impression asserts proximity to an origin while simultaneously marking its absence. Within this logic of inscription, one might discern a distant art-historical resonance with Yves Klein’s (1928–1962) Anthropometries (1958)—though without adopting their performative use of the body as an immediate painterly tool. In Frese’s work, this is replaced by a quieter, almost disembodied mode of presence in which monochromy and materiality generate a peculiar tension between visibility and withdrawal.

 

The small “rocket urn,” мир! (Peace!, 2024), marks a conceptual tipping point within the exhibition dispositif. Vessel, projectile, and container for ashes merge into a hybrid object oscillating between preservation and potential destruction, remembrance and launch. This work, too, follows a logic in which the body appears not as a stable unit, but as storage, charge, and endangerment—as a form always already shaped by the possibility of its own loss.

In Control/Collapse, Frese develops a sculptural vocabulary that conceives of the body as an unstable system—as a configuration that exists only through the interplay of holding and letting go, attachment and withdrawal. The fragmented limbs, serial casts, and vessel forms are less signs of lack than experimental arrangements. They ask how far the body can be dismantled, reordered, and recoded without dissolving altogether. In the hovering, suspended, supported, and leaning elements, a condition of in-betweenness becomes manifest: a not-collapsing that continually moves along the edge of collapse.

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Violence appears in this exhibition not as an eruptive event, but as a suspended condition embedded in form itself. Bodies interlock, support, or injure one another without this tension having to culminate in any visible outburst. The works remain led by chains, bound to walls, and translated into repetition. It is precisely here that instability becomes legible not as an exception, but as a fundamental condition. Control emerges as both an aesthetic and a social practice that shapes, constrains, and simultaneously keeps the body in a state of permanent reorganization.

 

Control/Collapse renders this ambivalence perceptible not only thematically, but spatially as well. Plinths, suspensions, chains, window zones, and wall reliefs form a display that does not assert definitive order, but instead articulates an unstable field of forces. Between holding and falling, fixing and slipping, structure and disintegration, a conception of the body unfolds that resists any final definition—and therein gains its particular urgency in the present.

 

Witalij Frese (*1992, Alexandrowka, Russia) explores questions of corporeality and bodily perception within the framework of cultural, political, religious, and psychological conditioning. His works challenge inherited norms of viewing and evaluating the body, and propose gender-free, sexually fluid beings that resist fixed categorization. At the core of his practice is the mutability of the body as an open, malleable, and constantly renegotiated form of existence. This inquiry becomes especially tangible in his ceramics, where the body appears as a fragile, organic shell.

 

Frese studied painting at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the Moscow State Academic Art Institute, and completed his M.F.A. in 2019 as a master student of Valérie Favre. He has received several grants and awards; in 2025, his work was acquired by the Miettinen Collection, Berlin. Recent exhibitions include presentations at the Winckelmann Museum, Kunsthalle Helsinki, and Galerie Droste in Paris. Frese lives and works in Berlin.