Beaux Mendes

Preview: written before the show opened

Reviewing Mendes's 2023 show Black Forest at Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin, Artforum's Travis Jeppesen found small, dark-pastel paintings on wooden panels and muslin that he called "haunted landscapes". Mendes, descended from rabbis and Holocaust survivors, had gone to paint in the Black Forest and the Elbe Valley, and in one untitled picture Jeppesen couldn't tell twisted tree trunks from two nude bodies.

White Forest, the Secession show, grows out of the same trips, plus California's Angeles National Forest. The Secession frames it as a look at landscape painting as a tool of colonial power and ethnonationalism. Most of the works are new, some made during a Vienna residency, and there are recent sculptures and more openly figurative paintings. Get close: you can see where Mendes scraped and wiped the paint back to the bare linen, wood or parchment.

It opens on 4 December. Admission is €13 (students under 26 €7.50, under-12s free) and covers the Beethoven Frieze. English tours run Saturdays at 11:00 for €3 extra.