Ellen Gronemeyer’s “DÉJÀ VU” at Anton Kern Gallery, New York: Paintings That Look Back at You

A woman points a TV remote straight out of the canvas, as if she could change the channel on you. That image, from a painting called Eurovision, captures the slightly unnerving charm of Ellen Gronemeyer: DÉJÀ VU at Anton Kern Gallery, New York. The Berlin-based painter’s third solo exhibition in the city, on view from 11 November 2026 to 16 January 2027, brings together twelve new oil paintings and — a first in her career — five small tables. It is a show about looking, and about the moment when the picture seems to look back.

Who is Ellen Gronemeyer?

Gronemeyer was born in Fulda, Germany, in 1979 and studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg from 1998 to 2005. She lives in Berlin. Anton Kern has shown her twice before, in frozen (2018) and Tausendmal Du (2021). She has had solo exhibitions at the Ludwig Forum Aachen, Greengrassi in London and Kadel Willborn in Düsseldorf, and her paintings are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMOMA, the Ludwig Forum and the Nevada Museum of Art. For a painter who works at a relatively intimate scale, that is a serious institutional footprint.

How she paints

The gallery describes a process led by materials and the unconscious. Gronemeyer works on many canvases at once and builds up the oil in numerous layers, so that image and surface are constantly negotiating. A figure may emerge, sink back into paint and reappear. The palette is bold, but she tempers it with black and white, which keeps the colour from turning sweet and gives the pictures a slightly nocturnal edge.

The result is painting that rewards a slow look. Thick passages carry the history of earlier decisions; you can often sense the ghost of a previous image beneath the current one. Déjà vu, in that sense, is built into the surface itself — every painting remembers having been something else.

Inside DÉJÀ VU

Gronemeyer’s figures, alone or in small groups, seem precarious, and she often crops them tightly so they feel isolated within the frame. In Single Bed, a woman stands on a mattress drifting through an abstract landscape like a life raft. In Eurovision, the closely framed woman with her remote breaks the fourth wall. Stormshutters, according to the gallery, playfully reworks Gerhard Richter’s grids and Josef Albers’ squares — a nod to two German-born masters of colour and system, translated into her own bumpier, more human language.

Then there are the tables. Each is a painted abstraction combined with broken glass, sealed in epoxy resin and mounted on a metal base. By placing the imaginary space of painting next to objects you could, in principle, set a cup on, the show asks how fantasy and reality blur in everyday looking. The tables extend her layering into three dimensions and stage a tension the gallery frames as unity versus fragmentation — the shattered glass held together by a clear, hard skin.

A Midtown setting

Anton Kern Gallery is located on East 55th Street in Midtown, a few blocks from MoMA. It is a different rhythm from the Chelsea gallery blocks: you can pair this show with a museum visit and a handful of uptown galleries in a single afternoon. The gallery also runs a 24/7 window space on Walker Street in Tribeca.

Why it matters

Figurative painting in New York has been dominated in recent years by smooth, image-forward canvases made for the screen. Gronemeyer goes the other way. Her surfaces are dense, her images uncertain, and her figures awkward in a way that feels honest. For collectors, she offers a mature, museum-collected painter whose work does not photograph easily — which is usually a sign it is better in person. The tables add a new category to her practice and are worth noting as a first.

For painters, the show is a case study in working many canvases at once. Letting one painting rest while another advances allows accidents to accumulate and decisions to cool. It is a method that produces exactly the layered, self-revising surfaces on view here.

Visiting information

Anton Kern Gallery, 16 East 55th Street, New York, NY 10022. 11 November 2026 – 16 January 2027 (no opening reception has been announced — check with the gallery). Open Tuesday–Saturday 10:00–18:00. Tel. +1 212 367 9663, [email protected]. See the gallery’s exhibition page, our Ellen Gronemeyer New York listing, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.