HUGO RUYANT
LEAVE A MESS AGE
KÖNIG GALERIE
ALEXANDRINENSTRASSE 118–121, 10969 BERLIN
5 JUNE – 12 JULY 2026
OPENING
4 JUNE 2026 | 6 – 8 PM
KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present LEAVE A MESS AGE, a solo exhibition by Hugo Ruyant, on view in the Vault of St. Agnes. This marks the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.
The exhibition begins with a game. The title LEAVE A MESS AGE breaks apart into separate words that one must chew over, roll around in the mouth, pronounce several times—slowly, quickly, with pauses in between. Each time the words are spoken aloud, they acquire a new meaning. Like those childhood games in which someone tricks you into saying something seemingly ordinary, only for it, once spoken, to turn into a joke at your expense.
LEAVE A MESS AGE is at once a look at the cacophony of information and voices that drown out our everyday lives, and a reflection on time and on how we, as social bodies, drift through it.
The exhibition is constructed as a dialogue and an antithesis between two bodies of work. On one side are the birds, chirping and tweeting incessantly. Within this far-from-idyllic birdsong, opinions, reflections, and theories are exchanged conspiratorially. Their songs intoxicate. Hugo Ruyant’s birds are not reduced to the cliché of flight and freedom; they are creatures with voices of their own, sometimes harboring sly thoughts.
Photo © Hugo Ruyant
A counterpart to the bird scenes are the seashell relics, emerging from the foam of days. In their silence, they muffle the chaos and invite us to sink into an ocean of emptiness. If the birds hover above the present moment—the ultra-modern modes of living and communication—then the shells stand for memory, for time stretched into infinity. And we, as observers, move between these two temporal modes of painting—between the fleeting and the eternal, between the speakers and those who listen.
Not only are the protagonists in the two series of paintings different, but the works themselves embody distinct techniques, gestures, and painterly sensibilities. The birds are large-scale and extroverted, executed with sweeping gestures as if in a single breath. The layering of caricatural figures, dense colors, and exuberant brushwork creates a dynamism that makes the paintings feel alive and pulsating with energy. The seashells, in contrast, are intimate, contemplative, and carefully considered. In the details of these vanitas-like works, Ruyant develops complex Baroque ornamentation and remarkable depth.
The exhibition LEAVE A MESS AGE is turbulent, hurling us into different corners of the emotional spectrum. It is full of vitality and humor, but also of profound reflections on our social behaviors and the mess in which we live.