Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in Berlin has opened Trickster, a solo exhibition by Bertram Hasenauer that runs from 25 September to 31 October 2026. A private view was held on the evening of 24 September. The show takes its name from the mythological figure who slips across boundaries and evades social and cultural expectation — part player, part deceiver. Several of Hasenauer's figures carry the names of famous tricksters, among them Loki, the shape-changing Norse god of mischief, and Ananse, the West African folk figure who most often appears as a spider. Others bear names the artist has invented himself. Rather than depicting specific people, he says he is painting an idea of a figure. The works emerge from a slow, exacting process: whisper-thin layers of pigment laid over white-primed canvas, or silhouettes drawn precisely in graphite on black grounds. Working with as few lines as possible, Hasenauer is interested in the threshold where perception gives way to imagination. In Ananse, for instance, the sitter is a woman rather than a spider, and part of her face seems unfinished or folded out of sight — yet the viewer instinctively fills in what is missing, completing the picture in the mind. That productive uncertainty extends to the physicality of the paintings themselves. Ochre works such as Ratatosk read like photographs bleached by the sun, an effect achieved with a thick, textured gesso base, while in Mechaniota the canvas looks as if it has been folded and unfolded like a photograph carried in a wallet. Alongside the portraits hang small landscape paintings in deep reds and blues that drift between representation and abstraction. Together they ask viewers not only to look again, but to question the images that surround them.