Circle Culture Gallery is proud to present Carsten Beck’s first solo exhibition in Hamburg, opening on October 16, 2025.
In 01_From Surface to Substance Carsten Beck invites us to enter a dynamic dialogue between the physical and the digital, the handmade and the algorithmic. The exhibition explores how urban architecture, once defined by weight, rhythm and proportion, is reinterpreted through the tools of our time: photography, artificial intelligence and painterly gesture.
Beck’s practice begins with the camera. His lens captures the monumental geometries of contemporary architecture, façades, grids and shadow play that speak of human order and ambition. Yet these photographs are only the foundation. Through digital manipulation and AI-driven abstraction Beck decomposes and reconfigures his images into new visual structures that oscillate between the real and the imagined. The resulting works suggest an architecture not of concrete and steel but of memory, perception and code.
This transformation continues beyond the screen. In large scale canvases and textile pieces Beck translates digital compositions into tactile form, using oil sticks, acrylics and stitched fabrics to create a tangible sense of depth and presence. His painterly layering process mirrors the logic of digital rendering while reclaiming the slowness and imperfection of the human hand. The surfaces pulse with color and structure, revealing how the digital can acquire substance and how material can regain emotion in a data driven world.
From an art historical perspective 01_From Surface to Substance resonates with the theories of Camillo Sitte (1843–1903), who championed the emotional and aesthetic experience of urban space over rigid rational planning. Where Sitte sought irregularity and human rhythm in the fabric of the city, Beck finds them anew in the digital landscape, transforming algorithmic order into visual poetry. Both insist that architecture, whether built or imagined, should be felt as much as seen.
Ultimately 01_From Surface to Substance is a meditation on perception itself, an invitation to reconsider how we see, construct and inhabit the spaces around us. It reveals that even in the digital age, substance arises not from material alone but from the interplay of mind, medium and emotion.
