lautlos
MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present lautlos, the first exhibition by Lenz Geerk in Basel. On view during Art Basel 2025, lautlos brings Geerk back to his birthplace with a series of new paintings that deepen his exploration of stillness and emotional ambiguity. Installed in the iconic Domushaus - a postwar modernist building that once housed Switzerland’s first museum for architecture - the exhibition unfolds around themes of intimacy, longing, and the gravity of endings.
The title, lautlos - German for ‘soundless’- serves as a prelude to a series of intimate, emotionally calibrated paintings where stillness becomes its own kind of presence. Each painting is anchored by a singular colour - green, red, orange - continuing Geerk’s ongoing investigation into tonal atmospheres. The rooms are sparse, the gestures minimal, the energy held rather than released.
Geerk has always been more interested in feeling than in narrative. In lautlos, he leans into that ambiguity. His figures don’t perform - they wait, they linger, they vanish. The paintings feel suspended in time, somewhere between memory and anticipation. They invite viewers into a space where nothing dramatic happens, yet everything feels on the verge.
A new series within the exhibition, titled A Lover’s Hair, centres on the near-invisible trace of a single strand of hair - held, forgotten, left behind on a bed or a stool. These small details hint at tenderness, absence, and secrecy. Geerk was drawn to the understated intensity of the motif and its narrative potential. It might be a trace left by a lover, the evidence of an affair, or even a token kept and offered in longing. They speak to the afterglow of intimacy - the way objects, gestures, and memories take on lives of their own, long after the moment has passed. In their restraint, they echo the show’s title: soundless, yet full of feeling.
An earlier work, Witnessing Death, introduces a different kind of stillness. There’s no spectacle, only presence, the act of watching something fade. Geerk’s composition is spare and controlled. What might first appear as a simple scene becomes a reflection on transience and the weight of endings. Without dramatising, the painting holds space for an experience that is both deeply personal and universally shared. It’s not about mourning but about noticing - being present in the delicate space between what remains and what is slipping away.
lautlos doesn’t seek resolution, nor does it require one. It offers something rarer: space to feel, space to stay with what’s unresolved. In the silence of these paintings, something lingers.
The Artist
Lenz Geerk was born in 1988 in Basel, Switzerland. He lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Geerk’s paintings feel like revelations - intimate, emotionally charged scenes that seem to float outside of time. While his approach is steeped in art history, there’s something unmistakably personal in the way he paints. The figures that inhabit his canvases often come from dreams or daydreams, their gestures and poses shaped more by feeling than by any real-life model.
He builds his compositions around subtle shifts in body language - a slouched shoulder, a glance held too long - small details that carry the weight of something unspoken. His palette is typically restrained, washed in pastel tones, occasionally punctuated by warmer accents. The atmosphere is thick, sometimes tense, but never loud.
Geerk’s focus is solitude, not loneliness, but a kind of introspective pause. His figures sit with themselves, and in doing so, invite the viewer to do the same. There’s often a flicker of humour or tenderness too, as if the painting knows something it’s not quite saying. In his paintings, Geerk captures the essence of our condition, exploring the depths of the psyche and the complexities of human emotion.