5 MACDONOUGH ST | SEPTEMBER 6 - SEPTEMBER 28, 2025

Sehnsucht | Running Forward To What’s Behind Us

REDHEAD is pleased to present Sehnsucht | Running Forward To What’s Behind Us, a multidisciplinary show highlighting the work of contemporary artists Joshua Bienko, Andreas Fischer, and Juan Hinojosa. The project space will host an opening reception on Saturday, September 6, from 2-5 PM.

According to the playwright Aristophanes, in Greek mythology, humans were formed with two heads, four arms, and four legs, and when they attempted to breach the heavens, Zeus cut them in half. The split halves, yearning for their lost pieces, set off on a neverending search for their missing self. This longing for, yet not knowing for whom, or for what, is part of what makes us human. It is this longing or desire, yearning or craving, the feeling that we’re missing something that we can’t define or name, that drives us to search for something of meaning. Something real, something tangible, something deep. We are torn between nostalgia, looking behind us in memories and shared experiences, while craving the potential perfection of the future.

In this exhibition, the three artists encapsulate aspects of Sehnsucht – translated from the German language as longing, desire, yearning, craving – a feeling that is poetic and evocatively explored in poetry and art. However, the limitations in the English language complicate this explanation, trying to explain a feeling without naming the feeling itself. The demarcations of nostalgia, longing, and searching are blurred. We only know of that familiar search for the missing self.

Joshua Bienko’s three paintings from his ongoing series Non vedo l’hora (translated as I can’t wait), originate from the myth of Orpheus and Euridice, our doomed hero who couldn't help himself. He had to look back to make sure his lover was there. This compulsion is what dooms this love story. In Bienko’s work, the tiger looks back at the viewer, as we study him, a reciprocal gaze. In addition, the play with patterns and surface in Bienko’s work, combined with visual puns and modes of representation explore notions of desire, looking, watching, and the consideration of the space between the viewer and the painting.

Andreas Fischer’s paintings are based on photographs, but are not copies of them, and instead exist in parallelity. Through the painting process, Fischer creates his own versions, reimagining and cataloguing the way humans interact and vibrate, the way lovers blur at the edges, weave through the terrain, the way we’re alone even when we’re with someone else. For Fischer, the work is about: “…indexing real human desires and movement.” Through his process, the image that remains is at once familiar, something we have seen before, and something we may never see again.

Juan Hinojosa doesn’t shy away from nostalgia. In his mixed media work, he uses found materials collected from the streets of New York, flea markets, and beyond, to create evocative paintings and sculptures that speak to the history of the materials, and at the same time, create new narratives. His work asks us to consider what we value on a material level, but also what we value as a society. At the work’s core, Hinojosa is focused on beauty and transformation. The explicit outcome is how the raw materials can be manipulated into a new reality.