With the new season, Alzueta Gallery is pleased to present Empordà paintings, an exhibition by Alexander Wertheim created during his residency at the space in La Bisbal d’Empordà, and on view at the Sèneca venue from September 18th to October 25th.

Born in 1995 in Wertheim, Germany, Alexander Wertheim is an artist trained at the Universität der Künste Berlin and at Hunter College in New York. He currently lives and works between Berlin and London. Empordà paintings is his first exhibition at Alzueta Gallery and his debut in Spain.

Wertheim’s work emerges from the tension between gesture and pattern, between intuitive freedom and pre-established order. His paintings are built upon networks of vertical and horizontal lines that, rather than imposing themselves, breathe and leave room for the unexpected. Within this structure, gesture unfolds like a human presence, fragile yet obstinate, that shakes the system and fills it with life. It is at the intersection of these two seemingly opposing elements that Wertheim locates the central point of his work. The artist seems to be searching for something between the horizontal and vertical lines, which overlap in translucent layers. Something that, most likely, is not tangible.

The artist seeks a broken beauty, rooted in a mistrust of harmony. It is precisely within this broken beauty that he finds his place: a space of fracture where imbalance is not a mistake, but a vital force. Pattern and gesture coexist without resolution, and it is within this unresolved tension that painting remains alive.

In Empordà paintings, this dialectic acquires a new dimension, where the colors, layered like glazes, evoke the clear Mediterranean light and the gentle rhythm of the Empordà landscape. Without ever representing it literally, the works hint at the resonance of this environment: the luminous summer air, the stillness broken by the wind, and the cadence of the days. Here, translucency becomes a pictorial attitude, opening the surface, allowing light, color, and gesture to circulate through it.

For Wertheim, painting is never a finished object. On the contrary, it is a surface under construction, always marked by tensions that remain unresolved. The artist paints in series, as if each canvas were a container for gestures and variations, creating a sustained improvisation evolving at its own rhythm. Lines and colors intersect, repeat, and dissolve, like echoes of a language that never fully settles. The result is a painting that breathes within contradiction: fragile and persistent, precise and erratic, open and inexhaustible.