lA MAISON PRESENTS:
Avant-Premiere Screening & Exhibition in Berlin
Reception: Friday, 20 November 2026, from 8 pm
Exhibition: 17–21 November 2026
Opening hours: daily, 1–7 pm
Torstraße 86 · Berlin-Mitte
RSVP: gianna@la-maison.co
A documentary film by Stefan Armbruster, alongside an exhibition of paintings, sculptures and installations by Johann Alexis.
The film
How does the place we live shape our outlook on the world?
Johann Alexis von Haehling left Berlin behind and found his artistic identity in rural Alsace. In breather., Stefan Armbruster traces this transformation: from life in the city to a daily rhythm in which art, nature and family come together.
At the heart of the 37-minute documentary is a conversation with Çağla Ilk, Artistic Director of the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, former Director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and curator of the German Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Moving between the studio, barn, garden and surrounding fields, the film unfolds as a poetic portrait of the possibility of reorienting one’s life. Personal reflections by Gianna von Haehling and music by Malcolm Gompf meet Armbruster’s quiet visual language in a film about change — and how a new place to live shapes both an artistic and a human outlook.
37 minutes · German with English subtitles.
Screening in the darkened room on the lower level, accessible during opening hours.
The exhibition
The Franco-German artist Johann Alexis von Haehling explores the relationships between form, matter and consciousness through painting, sculpture and installation. Deliberately reduced compositions, expansive fields of colour and biomorphic forms define a visual language that moves between organic and geometric structures. Material, emptiness and spatial relationships reveal connections and invite us to question familiar patterns of perception.
His practice begins with the idea of five interconnected domains of existence: the human mind, the plant world, the animal world, the cosmos and the spiritual dimension. Alexis asks what we can learn from their interplay — and what perspectives this might open for the ways we live together.
The exhibition brings selected works together with the installation Tomorrow Thinking. Through his podcast of the same name, Alexis extends artistic inquiry into the social sphere: conversation becomes a form of shared discovery and critical reflection. Centred on the work Truth is Capital, a video collage brings together different voices from the podcast. Their interpretations reveal how an artwork can become the starting point for an exchange about values, perception and profound questions about society.
The exhibition and the Tomorrow Thinking installation are on the ground floor.
