"With Visions of Collisions, Marie de Villepin brings to Germany a body of work that is as urgent as it is poetic. Her paintings confront us with the fractures of our time, yet insist on the possibility of renewal. We are proud to present this first solo exhibition in Germany, which resonates deeply with the questions and hopes of our present moment.”
– Stella Melbye-Konan, Gallerist and Art Historian
From October 10, 2025, to January 31, 2026, Galerie Melbye-Konan presents Visions of Collisions, the first solo exhibition in Germany by artist Marie de Villepin (*1986, Washington, D.C.). The exhibition brings together large-scale, multilayered works that oscillate between figuration and abstraction. Her paintings are infused with musical, literary, and political references—dense visual worlds where text fragments meet expressive gestures, delicate lines clash with eruptive fields of color.
Visions of Collisions unfolds in the eye of the storm. The works presented here are not simply paintings; they are fragments of a vision, shards of a prophecy whispered long before the ground gave way. In them one feels the vibrations of a world spiraling toward collapse, where the seams of order, faith, and reason are fraying at terrifying speed.
The inspirations are manifold and uncompromising. From the caustic wit of Raymond Pettibon, whose drawings scrawl prophetic headlines and half-heard lyrics, to the violent gestures of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, where energy itself becomes form, to the haunted cartoon gravitas of Philip Guston, these works absorb and refract these voices anew. Their language is collision: between image and text, chaos and meaning, fury and tenderness.
The titles themselves—The old World melts like a Candle, Someone is in the Wolf, City on the Fritz—read like slogans, misheard songs, fragments of overheard conversations on a street corner just before it erupts. They recall the syncopation of punk and the distortion of free jazz, where beauty emerges not from harmony but from dissonance. Like music written at the edge of catastrophe—Dylan electric at Newport, Coltrane spiraling upward, Patti Smith chanting “People have the power” against all evidence—the paintings carry an urgency that is both political and poetic.
Yet within the darkness, there is also light. For even as the works announce the proximity of an ending, they refuse despair. Each violent mark carries the possibility of renewal; each fragmented phrase suggests the stubborn resilience of language and imagination. If the paintings tell us that the world is collapsing, they also remind us that from collapse comes invention. That is the paradox of apocalypse: it is both revelation and destruction, an end and a beginning.
In this tension—between destruction and survival, fury and hope—lies the heartbeat of Visions of Collisions. It is a testament to our moment: a mirror held up not to flatter, but to awaken. To remind us that we live in times where history accelerates, where politics collapses into theater, where catastrophe threatens to become background noise. And yet, the paintings insist on something else: that even at the brink, we are still capable of grace, of vision, of faith in humankind.
Because the truth is simple, and devastating: the future will be both the best and the worst. And Visions of Collisions dares us to face that double edge—and to choose, again and again, the fragile glimmer of hope.
