Alan Charlton: Circle Paintings

To coincide with Berlin Art Week 2026, Konrad Fischer Galerie presents Circle Paintings, its twentieth solo exhibition with Alan Charlton, opening during Gallery Night on Thursday, 10 September, from 6 to 10 pm. Born in Sheffield in 1948, Charlton developed his practice at a moment when Minimalism, Post-Minimalism and Hard-Edge Abstraction were redrawing the boundaries of painting and sculpture. Since the mid-1970s he has held to a remarkably consistent artistic language, working only with the colour grey. Every painting obeys a precise system of measurement in which height, width and depth are all multiples of 4.5 cm. Through this rigorous logic of proportion, Charlton examines how the physical object of the painting relates to the architecture around it. His choice of grey grew out of a search for a functional colour, one associated with industrial production rather than with expression. Because grey carries so few associations, the works resist emotional or symbolic readings and turn attention instead to the direct encounter between painting and viewer. Within this tightly structured framework Charlton keeps inventing new forms. His repetitive way of working generates subtle shifts and nuances, so that repetition itself becomes a source of inspiration. The new works shown here centre on circular compositions that vary in diameter, in shade of grey and in the number of individual elements they contain. Charlton studied at Sheffield School of Art, Camberwell School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London. Major solo exhibitions of his work have been staged at Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2008) and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2001). His first solo show with Konrad Fischer Galerie took place in Düsseldorf in 1972 – the same year that Whitechapel Gallery in London gave him his first institutional solo exhibition, a formative moment that brought his work to a wider public. He has taken part in many important group exhibitions, above all documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, and his work has been shown at institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Charlton's paintings are held in numerous public collections, among them the ARCO Foundation Collection in Madrid; Espace de l'Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux; FNAC + CNAP Fonds national d'art contemporain in Paris; the Hall Art Foundation at Schloss Derneburg Museum; MuHKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp; Museu Berardo in Lisbon; Trevi Flash Art Museum in Italy; and ZKM | Karlsruhe.