Filipp Jenikäe Solo Exhibition at Galerie Sara Lily Perez

Readingtime:

Figures in Motion and Places Remembered

By the time Filipp Jenikäe’s figures appear on canvas, they are already mediated. Athletes mid-action, cityscapes saturated with signage, domestic spaces suspended in leisure. These are not direct observations but images remembered through screens, repetition, and movement.

In Figures in Motion and Places Remembered, Jenikäe’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Sara Lily Perez, Bringing together a significant body of work produced in 2025, the exhibition offers a profound investigation into contemporary urban life, exploring the intricate dynamics of architecture, spectatorship, and collective space.
Sports iconography, architecture, travel impressions, and collectible imagery coexist across vividly colored compositions that feel at once familiar and slightly displaced.

Jenikäe frequently turns to sports not as subject matter but as visual language. Tennis players, basketball stars, and historic baseball figures appear not as portraits but as carriers of movement and concentration. Their gestures are frozen at moments of intensity, echoing how athletic images circulate endlessly through broadcast, advertising, and digital feeds. In this sense, the athlete becomes a mnemonic device, a shorthand for aspiration, tension, and collective attention.

Urban environments function similarly. In paintings depicting Bangkok, swimming pools, and modernist domestic spaces, place is rendered less as geography and more as emotional residue. Signage, architecture, and interior details flatten into patterned fields, suggesting how cities are remembered through fragments rather than continuous experience.

Jenikäe’s interest in collectible imagery, including references to early twentieth-century trading cards, further complicates this relationship between image and memory. These works point to systems of value and repetition that long predate contemporary media culture, reminding viewers that the circulation of iconic images has always shaped how history is visualized and remembered.

Across the exhibition, spectacle and everyday life are treated with equal weight. A tennis match, a quiet poolside scene, and a dense city street are painted with the same compositional urgency. Rather than hierarchy, Jenikäe proposes accumulation. Meaning emerges not from a single image, but from the way images echo and overlap.

Figures in Motion and Places Remembered positions painting as a site of reassembly. Jenikäe does not document the world as it appears, but reconstructs it as it is carried forward. What remains is not accuracy, but recognition.

Filipp Jenikäe (b. 1987) is a German painter known for his vibrant, large-scale acrylic works that document the pulse of contemporary life. Raised in a family of art educators, Jenikäe initially pursued a different path, studying Law and Political Science at UAB Barcelona and Business Administration in the Netherlands. His artistic practice emerged later in life, crystallizing in Berlin around 2017 following the end of his childhood dream to play professional basketball.

Jenikäe’s work is characterized by a “sampling” aesthetic, a method he compares to DJing, where visual fragments from urban landscapes, pop culture, and sports history are remixed into cohesive, neo-expressionist compositions. His canvases often depict the communal euphoria of social spaces: nightclubs, bars, and city backyards, alongside portraits of cultural icons ranging from athletes to musicians.

Influenced by the bold coloration of David Hockney and the narrative figuration of Henry Taylor and Nina Chanel Abney, Jenikäe’s work bridges the gap between the immediacy of street culture and the tradition of genre painting. His works have been exhibited internationally, with representation in Paris, Hong Kong, and the United States, and have been featured at major auction houses including Sotheby’s and Phillips.

Galerie Sara Lily Perez Founded in 2021 Galerie SLP is a contemporary art gallery based in Berlin dedicated to advancing the dialogue between contemporary art and pressing social and environmental issues. Operating from its exhibition space in BIKINI BERLIN, Galerie Sara Lily Perez represents a diverse roster of emerging and established international artists working across painting, sculpture, digital media, and photography. Through a rigorous program of curated exhibitions, institutional collaborations, and public programming, the gallery fosters critical engagement and champions art as a catalyst for social change.

Exhibition Details: Title: Figures in Motion and Places Remembered Artist: Filipp Jenikäe Dates: 7 March – 18 April 2026 Location: Galerie Sara Lily Perez Address: Budapester Str. 48, 10787 Berlin, Germany

Press Contact

Galerie Sara Lily Perez
Email:galerie@saralilyperez.com
Website: www.saralilyperez.com

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Datapolicy