middlegate / middlegate

More than twenty years ago, Harald Stoffers began a fictional correspondence with his mother, in which all the letters started with “Liebe Mutti.” He began this exercise at a workshop for people with disabilities where he worked. He began by distributing them among his fellow workers as small torn notes. Presented in a film by Youssef Tabti at the Grand Palais in 2009, his work was included in institutions as the Mona (Australia), the Hamburger Bahnhof—National Gallery of Contemporary Art (Berlin), the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Turin), Galerie der Villa (Hamburg), l’Oliva Creative Factory (Portugal), le Dox Art Center (Prague), and the Maison rouge (Paris). A significant number of his works were donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021.

In his eighteens, while he got ready to start studying fine arts, a coma after a serious motorcycle accident changed the promising life of this young artist. The impossibility of recovery condemned Dominique Théte to fantasize about his life. This is why almost all his drawings are followed by a “Shema (sic) representing me…” where he stages different aspects of his fantasy life, whereas in the afternoon suit he would wear during his marriage, in a comedian loved by his audience, in a star singer, or in the reproduction of the numerous cars he dreams of. As Anne-Françoise Rouche implied: “Because he was stolen from his construction of common person, he is going to draw and to write that of[…]

This Cuban artist has no other means of expression than that of her creation. The walls of her home, where she lives with her mother, are covered with drawings of bodybuilders, brown tape scattered along the outlines. A true community of men, women, hermaphrodites and wildlife, Misleidys has built her sociality through her work. Discovered by the gallery in 2014, she has been featured in more than 10 international exhibitions since 2018, including New Images of Man in Los Angeles, Flying High in Vienna, and Independent in New York. Acclaimed by Matthew Higgs and Karen Wong (New Museum, NYC), the artist has been the subject of recent reviews in the New York Times and Art in America.
A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021.

A member of the renowned Goldstein workshop in Germany, this young artist is fascinated by the limits of perception. In his work, sounds, vibrations, waves and interferences are rendered visible. Bringing together observation and poetry, network structures emerge and create striking optical illusions. Exhibited in a gallery for the first time in 2020, Julius Bockelt has already been offered a monographic exhibition at the Folkwang Museum in Essen and has been presented at the Museum of Everything (London), the Maison rouge (Paris) and the MoNa in Brierdale (Australia). In 2023, he was exhibited alongside Gerhard Richter at the Museum Sainclair-Haus in Germany.

Tomasz Machciński (1942–2022), a war orphan and Polish laborer, dedicated 50 years of his life to creating over 22,000 photographic self-portraits. Ten years before Cindy Sherman, Machciński embarked on an intense quest for identity. Recently discovered, this monumental work has been acclaimed at the Rencontres d’Arles, Paris Photo, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and the Independent Art Fair in New York.

• According to the artist’s wishes and in agreement with the Machciński Foundation, only 2,500 photographs from the estate will eventually be available for sale.