SETAREH is excited to announce our participation in DC Open 2025 with a new exhibition titled, Before the Light. The exhibition features the works of Georg Baselitz, Erwin Bechtold, Peter Brüning, Adolf Luther, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Bernard Schultze and Emil Schumacher.

Adolf Luther’s kinetic construction, with its precise engineering and subtle movement, allows light to become a medium itself, emphasizing spatial experience. Otto Piene’s fire- and smoke-based paintings register the traces of combustion, converting processes of destruction and transformation into images that mediate between material density and sensory impact. Baselitz, Bechtold, Brüning, Mack, Schultze and Schumacher extend this conversation in a painterly register, demonstrating how post-war abstraction and the Zero movement grappled with the phenomenology of light. Rather than representing darkness as emptiness or void, these artists use darkness as a form-generating force through layering, scratching, and building up surfaces to create a sense of depth, tension, and energy.