On Friday, September 25, at 7 pm, Goldstein Galerie will open the solo exhibition Wer die Welt kennt featuring works by Franz von Saalfeld.
Raised in a family of artists, Franz von Saalfeld has been developing an extensive body of work since his early youth, poetically and thoughtfully portraying his own life and everyday life in a small German town – filled with details that quietly reveal themselves beneath the surface.
The exhibition focuses on drawings and watercolors in which text plays an integral role. In his often autobiographical, sometimes surreal scenes, writing becomes an inherent part of the image: appearing as a heading, speech bubble, street sign, short poem, or multi-line narrative that humorously comments on the scene. Image and language tell stories, complement one another, contradict each other, and subtly shift one another’s meaning. Through the artist’s idiosyncratic spelling and phrasing, Saalfeld creates visual constructions of words in which language itself becomes a means of pictorial expression, leading into a world of its own – unexpected, subtly caricatural, and at times deliberately peculiar.
The world Franz von Saalfeld depicts is not simply an idyllic retreat into small-town life. The apparent order of the provincial town is repeatedly disrupted by cracks and contradictions. Saalfeld turns his attention to everyday situations and details that many of us may have lost the sensitivity to notice in the course of daily life. Between the everyday and the imaginary, observation and invention, moments emerge in which seemingly inconspicuous scenes open onto larger questions: of closeness and distance, the desire to preserve a familiar sense of order alongside the simultaneous longing for freedom, and of life and death.
The exhibition’s titular work, “Wer die Welt kennt” (Who Knows the World), brings this particular way of apprehending the world into focus. It depicts a fragment of a map-like world of places, fields, and lakes – a landscape born from the artist’s imagination that, through its individual names and labels, simultaneously takes on the appearance of a familiar geography. What is real here, and what is invented? And what does it mean, after all, to know the world?
For Franz von Saalfeld, the point is less to explain the world than to look at it closely. Who knows the world? The person who can locate its places on a map? Or the one who looks closely enough to notice its small, strange, and sometimes funny stories?
WHERE Goldstein Galerie, Schweizer Str. 84, Frankfurt am Main OPENING Friday, September 25, 7 pm DURATION September 26 bis November 7, 2026 OPENING HOURS Thursday–Saturday, 2–6 pm
September 26 – November 7, 2026
On Friday, September 25, at 7 pm, Goldstein Galerie will open the solo exhibition Wer die Welt kennt featuring works by Franz von Saalfeld.
Raised in a family of artists, Franz von Saalfeld has been developing an extensive body of work since his early youth, poetically and thoughtfully portraying his own life and everyday life in a small German town – filled with details that quietly reveal themselves beneath the surface.
The exhibition focuses on drawings and watercolors in which text plays an integral role. In his often autobiographical, sometimes surreal scenes, writing becomes an inherent part of the image: appearing as a heading, speech bubble, street sign, short poem, or multi-line narrative that humorously comments on the scene. Image and language tell stories, complement one another, contradict each other, and subtly shift one another’s meaning. Through the artist’s idiosyncratic spelling and phrasing, Saalfeld creates visual constructions of words in which language itself becomes a means of pictorial expression, leading into a world of its own – unexpected, subtly caricatural, and at times deliberately peculiar.
The world Franz von Saalfeld depicts is not simply an idyllic retreat into small-town life. The apparent order of the provincial town is repeatedly disrupted by cracks and contradictions. Saalfeld turns his attention to everyday situations and details that many of us may have lost the sensitivity to notice in the course of daily life. Between the everyday and the imaginary, observation and invention, moments emerge in which seemingly inconspicuous scenes open onto larger questions: of closeness and distance, the desire to preserve a familiar sense of order alongside the simultaneous longing for freedom, and of life and death.
The exhibition’s titular work, “Wer die Welt kennt” (Who Knows the World), brings this particular way of apprehending the world into focus. It depicts a fragment of a map-like world of places, fields, and lakes – a landscape born from the artist’s imagination that, through its individual names and labels, simultaneously takes on the appearance of a familiar geography. What is real here, and what is invented? And what does it mean, after all, to know the world?
For Franz von Saalfeld, the point is less to explain the world than to look at it closely. Who knows the world? The person who can locate its places on a map? Or the one who looks closely enough to notice its small, strange, and sometimes funny stories?
WHERE Goldstein Galerie, Schweizer Str. 84, Frankfurt am Main
OPENING Friday, September 25, 7 pm
DURATION September 26 bis November 7, 2026
OPENING HOURS Thursday–Saturday, 2–6 pm