Nanna Abell, Ib Braase, Pernille With Madsen, Clara Schmidt, Troels Wörsel
enter stage left
08 May – 04 Jul 2026
In 1993, Troels Wörsel (1950-2018, DK) painted the scenography for WHO’S FAKING WHO? a play written by jazz-writer and ECM collaborator, Steve Lake, performed in Munich by Collin Gilder together with percussionist Famadi Sako. The project emerged from the European free jazz and performance milieu based in or near Munich in the late 1980s – early 90s, then a hub for touring musicians, improvisation, experimental theatre, coolness (in the most jazzist sense of the word), excessive seriousness… and art.
Constructed from fragments of overheard conversations, borrowed quotations, technical complaints, tour stories, and jazz mythology, the play text moves through accounts of macho genius collapsing into slapstick, impossible egos and stories so good nobody seems particularly concerned with whether they are true or not. Julio Iglesias appears at the side of a grocery store in Montevideo. Cannonball Adderley complains that Coltrane’s solos are too long. Miles Davis suggests that he try taking the horn out of his mouth. Peter Brötzmann nails a cow’s head to a front door in Wuppertal. Eventually, Copenhagen enters the play when Chet Baker runs out of glue for his teeth and offers to sing instead. Everybody speaks in punchlines and tech issues become something close to existential philosophy. Everybody is busy becoming a legend while simultaneously behaving like an idiot.
Troels Wörsel’s major painting-scenography resurfaced the way many good stories do, unexpectedly and in fragments. When Collin Gilder arrived at the gallery last month, with the work in two moving boxes, it arrived as a thirty-two-part problem: thirty-two acrylic on canvas panels, painted on both sides. Something few knew existed. At first, nobody could quite work out how the thing was supposed to come together. Narrow holes drilled through the frame and the canvases suggested some missing structure (though they could just as easily have been attributed to Wörsel’s experimentation in the studio). Then, a month later and with the installation date looming, a brown envelope landed in the gallery from Munich. Inside were a handful of photographs from the original February 1993 performance, as well as a hard copy of the manuscript. From these fragments, the display structure revealed itself and the thirty-two-part problem, now solved, formed two reversible, interchangeable compositions. The work, now reconstructed, was staged once more.
After the (re)discovery of Wörsel’s work, this exhibition gradually assembled itself around the stage (or notions of “staging”), bringing together works spanning 1987 to 2026 that are not exactly afraid of the spotlight.