With ironic nonchalance, Malte Zenses’ paintings and sculptures expand the vocabulary of abstract painting and new realism by incisively integrating the zeitgeist through autobiographical fragments. His inspiration often arises from a memory, a place, or a fleeting image. Rather than narrating himself directly, he conceals personal references within a system of signs, symbols, and texts that invite interpretation.
Far from imposing a fixed narrative, Zenses creates a space where viewers activate their own memories. In this way, his work becomes a diffuse mirror of the present—shaped by the interplay between the digital and the analog, between visual saturation and the search for meaning. His practice is a constant movement across formats, channeling the collective through personal experience. Each piece becomes a visual translation of the everyday—a way of recycling the world into code.
Lives and works in Berlin
Malte Zenses was born in 1987 in Solingen and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt. Throughout his career, he has surrounded his work and his imaginary with many other disciplines in a collaborative way, through personal and professional relationships he has developed with musicians, tattoo artists, photographers, writers, scientists, and other members of one of the world's most active cultural ecosystems in the German capital.
His work evolves rapidly, adapting to the vertiginousness of contemporary life. He mimics establishing formal, conceptual and material links with the sites where Zenses develops his research and projects, among which stand out, above all, presentations in Germany at the G2 Kunsthalle Leipzig, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz and an experimental project he carried out with the Valentino haute couture house, in which he developed a series of garments in dialogue with his pictorial work.
During 2025, Zenses executed a three-part project based on a four-month research in Mexico City. During this time, his language found new stimuli in a city of enormous complexity. The result of his experience and the affective networks he developed in the capital of our country was a trio of exhibitions of “Mexican paintings” that were presented at Pequod, Sperling and LISTE in a period of 4 months. This series of exhibitions opened up a new strand in the never-ending conversation about painting, and its role as an ambassador between seemingly opposing regions that have built bridges and exchanges with each other throughout history.
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