La Valse des fleurs
As part of Rendez-vous, Basement
October 26, 2025 – January 25, 2026
At the Lambert Collection, German artist Constantin Nitsche presents his first major solo exhibition in a public institution. In the basement rooms of the Hôtel de Montfaucon, he exhibits some twenty works specially created in his Marseille studio.
Constantin Nitsche’s paintings are sensitive constructions in which characters and settings from his everyday life are mixed with fictional objects and situations, with references drawn from the history of modern and classical art or cinema.
Each of these scenes is the result of a skilful balancing act through which the artist continually re-enacts his relationship with painting and the world.
Like him, the subjects he paints exist only in limbo, searching for their rightful place, affected by the places they inhabit. Animals, still lifes, and human beings—his wife, his children, Joseph, an artist friend—are suspended in space and time, ethereal, their gaze inscrutable.
In rooms with luminous ceilings reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the works follow one another like epiphanies emerging from the artist’s memory, embarking on a choreography whose movement reenacts Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers.
Biography
Constantin Nitsche transforms everyday scenes into enigmatic compositions that oscillate between fiction and reality. The painter draws inspiration from his immediate surroundings: people and interiors, social interactions, animals and nature, street scenes and still lifes. These elements are not rendered literally, but distilled—through the filter of memory and the act of painting—into lyrical compositions that make little or no reference to time or place. The interiors are bare and impersonal, the faces impenetrable and impassive, the streets and landscapes devoid of topographical detail. This indeterminacy is deliberate: Nitsche does not seek to recreate specific or immediately recognizable scenes, preferring to leave their meaning open to interpretation. Nitsche’s paintings are also exercises in color and composition, his style alternating between sharply contoured, contrasting color schemes and delicate brushwork. Tonal relationships, which can be complementary or contrasting, play a decisive role in creating the atmosphere.
Constantin Nitsche (born in 1987 in Ludwigshafen, Germany) lives and works in Marseille. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His solo and group exhibitions include Blauregen, La Traverse, Marseille (2022); VIOLETTE, O-Town House, Los Angeles (2021); Everything is Personal, TRAMPS, New York (2020); Untitled, Parkhaus im Malkastenpark, Düsseldorf (2019); and Salon des Amateurs, TRAMPS, London (2018).