Former Future is the fifth exhibition we are dedicating to Robert Brambora at Sans titre. A symbolic number, marking the long duration of an ongoing dialogue. Robert Brambora has accompanied many of our firsts: a first solo show, a first solo exhibition outside the gallery space in Europe, as well as exhibitions that, in retrospect, seemed to anticipate the time in which they unfolded. One of them opened only forty-eight hours before the first Covid lockdown. Visitors crowded the space, without distance, before this crisis abruptly reshaped our ways of living, moving, working, and looking at the world.
Today, this fifth exhibition once again unfolds at a moment of transition. A time of global political upheaval, increasing fragility of democratic systems, and uncertainty regarding the forms that collective life may take in the future. This context is not an external backdrop to the exhibition, it constitutes its active background.
The project is structured around contradiction. The exhibition title itself, Former Future, functions as an oxymoron, evoking a future that no longer exists, or a future as it was imagined in the past. In Robert Brambora’s work, the future is never a clear promise. It appears as a speculative image, inherited from science fiction, socialist utopias, or childhood memories, and one that never fully materialized.
The paintings depict urban and suburban landscapes, often fragmented, burned, engulfed in fog or night.The city functions here as a collective system. Human figures appear within these scenes, sometimes isolated, sometimes absorbed into the setting. They play music, watch, wait. Screens, omnipresent, introduce another temporality: that of continuous flow and endless digitality. The eyes that emerge in certain compositions do not merely look, they bear witness. They place the viewer in the position of an observer who is, in turn, drawn into the dispositif.
In counterpoint, sculptures and reliefs in gilded ceramic emerge from burned pieces of furniture, remnants of a damaged everyday life. Architecture is transposed into furniture: houses become cabinets, desks, fragments of interiors. The reliefs evoke both idealized images linked to childhood and the memory of monumental reliefs from socialist public space, particularly in cities of the former GDR, such as Halle, where the artist is from and where he grew up. This genealogy is also intimate: Robert Brambora’s grandfather was an artist in the GDR and produced several public works in ceramic and relief.
These reliefs are tactile, heavy, deeply anchored in materiality. They oppose their physical presence to the immateriality of digital images. They give form to fragments of a world that never truly existed, in which work, collectivity, and production were charged with symbolic value. Scenes extracted from a film we never saw, windows opening onto a future that remains out of reach. Between a reconstructed past and a speculative future, the works maintain a constant tension, without resolution.
This exhibition may be quieter, more peripheral in its landscapes, but it is not appeased. It acknowledges that we all inhabit this fractured world. It nonetheless sketches a space of coexistence, where fragility, occasional humor, and the persistence of simple gestures, playing music, looking, being present, open the possibility of another relationship to time and to the collective.
Robert Brambora (born in 1984, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He completed his studies in the class of Rebecca Warren at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2015. Brambora had solo exhibitions at EIGEN + ART Lab, Berlin (2025); MAMOTH, London (2025); Sans titre, Paris (2023, 2022, 2020 & 2017); Zentrale, Karlsruhe (2022); Motto Books, Berlin (2022); Tobias Naehring, Berlin (2021); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2019); Kunstverein Wiesen (with Jan Kiefer), Wiesen (2016) and Salon Kennedy, Frankfurt (2015). This summer, the artist will be part of the Biennale of Contemporary Keramics, Rhodes Island. Previous selected group shows include 8. Salon, Hamburg (2024); Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig (2024); dacodac, Zurich (2024); Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2023); Mamoth, London (2023); Nice Biennale, Le 109, Nice (2022); Weberknechte, Verein für Kunst e.v. – Hinterconti HellsClub, Hamburg (2021); CAN – Centre d’Art Neuchâtel (2020); Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (2020); Ginny on Frederick, London (2020);Nagel Draxler Gallery, Cologne (2019); Haverkampf Gallery, Berlin (2019), Tobias Naehring, Leipzig (2019); Kunstverein Mönchengladbach (2019); Neuer Kunstverein Essen, Essen, (2018); Basement, Leipzig (2018); Walz, Frankfurt (2018); PIK, Cologne (2017); Schkeudi, Leipzig (2017); Real positive, Cologne (2016); Fiebach/Minninger, Cologne (2016); ABC Kolonie, Copenhagen (2015); Salon Schmitz, Cologne (2015); Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf (2013) amongst others.
