Ian Waelder

thereafter

In thereafter, Ian Waelder connects the façade, atrium, and arcade hall of the Kestner Gesellschaft for the first time to form a spatial narrative between inside and outside, past and present. His works begin at the edges of the rememberable: familial traces, biographical fractures, everyday remnants – not as evidence, but as fragile carriers of a story that resists linear narration.

At the center of Waelder’s solo exhibition stands a labyrinthine structure made of cardboard, evoking the image of a packed moving box. The offset entrance of the arcaded hall diverts the gaze away from clear paths. Inside, sculptures, newspaper collages, a piano melody, and the materiality of cardboard and light condense into a dense assemblage—including a newspaper article covered with oats and traces of butter with the headline “Erbarmen” (“Mercy”), a deformed shoe last with a porcelain-like nose titled Sprain (38) (2023), and molded components from the Bystander (2025) series with dangling shoelaces. These are traces of domestic routines that elude concrete memory and yet evoke a strangely familiar atmosphere.

At irregular intervals, a brief piano melody sounds, preceded by the splash of falling water. This acoustic gesture traces a personal thread: memories of childhood melodies and his grandfather’s music accompany Waelder in his current residency at the Laurenz-Haus Foundation in Basel, where he came across a piano by chance and recorded a fragmentary piece. The artist, grandfather fled to Chile in 1939, weaves acoustic and material fragments into a poetics of remembrance in which the incomplete begins to take shape.

On the façade, Self-portraits as my father’s nose (2025) – proportionally enlarged nose sculptures made of seeds, in collaboration with his father, wait to be eaten by pigeons and other birds – their outlines might remain visible as traces. In the foyer, a triptych of raw linen works shows a running boy who seems to be moving forward out of the pictorial space as if in a filmic rewind– a quiet gesture of remembrance, a cinematic leap back into the past. Waelder’s use of materials and his works resist clear legibility and temporality. They conceive of memory not as reconstruction, but as a tentative movement along gaps, shifts, and sedimented surfaces where absence is most powerfully present.

Curator: Alexander Wilmschen
curatorial assistance: Emilia Radmacher

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Ian Waelder (born 1993 in Madrid, Spain) is a Spanish artist and publisher. He graduated in Fine Arts from the Städelschule in Frankfurt a. M. His artistic work deals with collective memory practices and personal history and encompasses a variety of media including photography, sculpture, sound, found objects and printmaking and room installations. Ian Waelder currently works and lives between his hometown Mallorca, Frankfurt am Main and Basel.

Waelder has been awarded a number of prizes, including HAP – Hessisches Atelier Programm – basis Frankfurt am Main (2025), the Kunststiftung DZ Bank Förderstipendium 2023/24, the WIELS Center for Contemporary Art Residency (2024), the Städteschule Portikus e. V. Graduate Prize (2023), and the Art Nou Prize of the Barcelona Art Galleries (2022). His works have been presented internationally in numerous solo exhibitions, including thereafter (Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, 2025), cadence (carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2025). His group exhibitions include Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud (Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2025), I Opened the Curtain to See What Lays Behind (carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2024), A=A, B=B (Tapies Foundation, Barcelona, 2023), and Balusters (Francis Irv, New York, 2023) among others.