Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to present Toxic Birds of Metaphysics, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Tamara K.E., on view from July 7 through August 8, 2025.

In her multivariate practice, Tamara K.E. synthesizes the pictorial worlds of media, drawing on the visual idioms of advertising, illustration, graphic design, and fashion photography to create works that transmit empathy while remaining inscrutable. K.E.'s language unfolds through ambiguity: seemingly random and energetically charged systems of codes, signifiers, and fields that drift between memory, fiction, and formal play. The artist conjures work that, in her words, “doesn’t want one understanding" and resists narrative closure through constant experimentation with the technical and material possibilities of drawing, painting, and digital media.

The five large-format paintings in this exhibition were completed between 2011 and 2013 as part of the series The Day After the Future. Rendered in saccharine pastel hues, they possess a quality of lightness—shorthand for ideas still in formation. At first glance, the works appear too smooth, as if auto-generated by an arbitrary image machine. But beneath the surface lies a nuanced painterly intelligence. The pictorial fields pulse with simulations of digital surface effects, and deliberate visual slippage. In this series, K.E. abandons both the indexical gestures of Abstract Expressionism and the structural formalism of Post-painterly Abstraction, producing canvases that evoke a digitally mediated atmosphere entirely by analog means. 

As art critic Ekin Erkan writes in his essay "Tamara K.E.'s 'Love You, Don’t Love You' and the Pluralist Post-Modern Condition," these works “posi[t] errant lattices and lilac-striated arrays along the corners of a beclouded, soft pictorial field fogged by peach, mauve, and russet stroke-based cantons,” offering “little one can optically latch on to as a worldly anchor.” Erkan continues: “Tamara’s canvases abrogate both the archival gesture that tethered the Abstract Expressionists’ skeins and splatters to identifiably human movements and geometrical indices, which moored subsequent Post-Painterly Abstractionists....to the world of geometry and form.” While executed traditionally in oil on canvas, the works project a “veritably digital miasma,” suggesting “computer strokes produced in Microsoft Paint or Adobe Illustrator.” The effect is what curator and writer Gean Moreno previously termed their "digital surfaces," an analog simulation of digitality that disorients both form and content. 

Though made more than a decade ago, K.E.’s paintings shrewdly anticipate the glitchy semiotics of 2020s AI. They offer not synthetic images, but synthetic meaning—fragments from a cultural unconscious where signs refuse to settle into interpretation. What might seem like algorithmic chance is, in fact, a deliberate embrace of postmodern ambiguity: a collapse of orientation, where no singular narrative or style prevails. K.E.’s prescient exploration of the visual glitch and the slippage between image and meaning offers an uncanny glimpse into today’s self-cannibalizing visual culture—a pictorial condition in which everything is readable, yet nothing is legible.

Tamara K.E. is a Georgian-born German artist who emerged from the Düsseldorf art scene in the early 2000s, where she had been based since 1997. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Meisterschülerin of Alfonso Hüppi), graduating in 2004. Since 2010, she has lived and worked between Düsseldorf and New York, where she was based until 2018. Tamara K.E. is best known for her socio-critical conceptual paintings as well as her recent large-scale works, which combine traditional painting with printed media. Her practice is marked by extensive experimentation with visual idioms and the technical possibilities of drawing, painting, and digital processes. K.E. is a series-based artist: each of her series is visually and emotionally distinct, with its own material logic and conceptual focus. While they follow a rough chronological development, some series overlap or evolve simultaneously.

K.E. represented Georgia at the 50th Venice Biennale and was invited to participate in the 1st Prague Biennale. Her work has been shown widely in the United States and across Europe at institutions including Daimler Contemporary, Haus Huth, Berlin; Sprengel Museum, Hanover; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Central House of Artists, Moscow; CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam; Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Kunsthalle Göppingen, and others. Her collaborative project Next Comes Democracy, produced in partnership with Hans Mayer Gallery (Düsseldorf), is on permanent display at Daimler Contemporary’s headquarters at Haus Huth in Berlin. K.E. has received several prestigious awards, including the Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken (Germany), the UBS Art Award (Switzerland), and the European Prize for Painting (Belgium). She has been nominated for the Fountainhead Artist Residency (Miami), the Etaneno Museum Residency  (Namibia), and the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) (New York). She has lectured and led workshops at institutions including Goldsmiths, University of London; Kunstakademie Kassel; Berlin University of the Arts; New York Studio Residency Program; Rutgers University, New Brunswick; Tbilisi State Academy of Arts; Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden; Mozarteum University Salzburg; Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe; and Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig. 

K.E.'s works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the UBS Private Bank Collection, Deutsche Bank Collection, Daimler Contemporary Art Collection, Van der Heydt Museum Collection, Sammlung der Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, Museum SAFN Reykjavík, Deutsche Apotheker- und Ärztebank Collection, Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg, Sammlung Provinzial Rheinland, as well as in private collections such as the Jochen and Susi Holy Collection (Munich), Collection Susanne Porsche (Munich), Edward & Phyllis Kwalwasser Collection (New York), and Sammlung Philara (Düsseldorf), among others. Her work was included in "100 Painters of Tomorrow," published by Thames & Hudson in 2014. Her first monograph, "none of us and somewhere else", was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2007 and features essays by Boris Groys (NYU) and Renate Wiehager (Daimler Contemporary). Her second monograph, "fading song in the wide open", was published in 2018 by DISTANZ Verlag in collaboration with Uta Grosenick, and includes essays by Gregor Jansen (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf) and Gean Moreno (ICA Miami).