Image: Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Xavier Hufkens has released ‘Studio Notes from Marseille’, a short film featuring German painter Constantin Nitsche in his studio in Marseille. The intimate portrait accompanies ‘Les mains’, Nitsche’s second exhibition at the gallery, which opened on 27 August at Xavier Hufkens’s Van Eyck location in Brussels and remains on view through 31 October 2026.
The film presents Nitsche reflecting on his approach to painting and on the surroundings that inform his work. The gallery describes his images as moving between fiction and reality, a tension also central to the exhibition. The film was made by Victor Galliani, with music by Wendy Luo and Kalyma.
Nitsche, born in 1987 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, lives and works in Marseille. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His exhibition history cited by the gallery includes ‘La Valse des fleurs’ at Collection Lambert in Avignon in 2025, ‘Blauregen’ at La Traverse in Marseille in 2022 and ‘VIOLETTE’ at O-Town House in Los Angeles in 2021. Xavier Hufkens presented his exhibition ‘Oranges et Lavande’ in Brussels in 2023.
‘Les mains’ takes its title from a sentence in one of Franz Kafka’s letters to Milena Jesenská: ‘I can’t hold enough of you in my hands.’ For Nitsche, the line reflects the experience of painting, in which an image may approach something without ever fully possessing it. The exhibition text characterises his process as one of layering, revision and subtraction, with earlier states sometimes remaining as traces beneath the painted surface.
The works move among self-portraiture, still life and fragments of everyday life. Recurring motifs include plants, interior decoration and domestic objects, which reappear transformed by repetition, memory and circumstance. The exhibition includes ‘Nature morte au melon’, in which foreground, background and a printed tablecloth appear to merge, as well as ‘La Visite VI’, ‘La Canicule III’ and the paired paintings ‘Les mains’ and ‘La main’.
Marseille’s landscape also enters the series. ‘L’horizon (Février)’ observes the sea from a particular time and vantage point, while ‘Le Roucas Blanc II’ begins with observation before shifting through the act of painting. Another work depicts Nitsche as Pinocchio, placing the artist before James McNeill Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold — The Falling Rocket’ of around 1875, a painting held by the Detroit Institute of Arts. ‘Studio Notes from Marseille’ is available through Xavier Hufkens’s video programme, while ‘Les mains’ is on view at Van Eyck until 31 October 2026.
