Image: Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin
Galerie Thomas Schulte has opened ‘Just Looking’, a solo exhibition by Richard Deacon that pairs new prints with large-format ceramic sculptures in the gallery’s Charlottenstrasse space in Berlin. The exhibition runs from 4 July to 15 August 2026 and is presented as a current exhibition on the gallery’s website, with the works distributed across the building’s inner rooms and street-facing display.
According to the gallery, ‘Just Looking’ focuses on Deacon’s sustained interest in the character of materials and the way form develops through repetition, variation and construction. The presentation brings together ceramics, digital prints on polyester and lacquered steel, with the gallery describing the show as an exploration of surfaces that can appear matt or glossy, smooth or rough, open or closed, flat or voluminous. The exhibition text emphasizes that Deacon’s practice has long been defined by a systematic approach that keeps producing new variations without reducing them to a single formula.
A central group in the exhibition is ‘I Know What You Are Thinking’ (2023–24), a series of glazed ceramic sculptures whose irregular, low-lying forms are compared in the gallery text to scattered puzzle pieces. Their layered glazes produce pastel and jewel-toned surfaces marked by cracks, speckles and hatched impressions. The works sit close to the ground and partially lift away from it, making the space beneath them part of the sculptural reading.
The exhibition also includes works from the series ‘Do You Agree’ (2025), in which Deacon changes the orientation of the ceramic forms. The gallery notes that ‘Do You Agree #1’ and ‘Do You Agree #2’ stand upright and shift the sense of the works from uncertainty to assertion. One is described as a rounded, elongated yellow form, while the other takes on a darker, torso-like presence. The contrast between the horizontal and vertical pieces is used to show how a simple change in stance can alter the relationship between mass, plane and bodily association.
Another section of the exhibition features ‘Desert’ (2026), a group of prints on sublimated polyester composed from four parts each. These prints enlarge drawings Deacon originally made on his phone, transferring them from a digital surface to a textile support. The gallery describes the resulting images as ghostly, with interwoven lines that can evoke weather patterns, rippling water or closely viewed surface structure. The title is one of several in the exhibition that point to Deacon’s interest in how image and material can hover between presence and immateriality.
‘Just Looking’ also includes a group of lacquered steel sculptures from 2017–18, titled with three-letter combinations such as ‘abc’, ‘def’, ‘ghi’ and ‘jkl’. The gallery says these pieces are built from visible seams, intersecting polygons and overlapping layers that make them read as both line drawings in space and freestanding objects. Deacon’s use of paint and lacquer heightens reflections and shadows across the metallic surfaces, reinforcing the sense of a sculptural language made from repeated elements.
The exhibition text concludes by linking these works to Deacon’s “distinctive visual language,” which the gallery says invites more than a passing glance. ‘Just Looking’ is on view at Galerie Thomas Schulte’s Charlottenstrasse gallery in Berlin through 15 August 2026.
