Ebertplatz, Cologne — the sentence on the shop window, between the passage and the platform. Kunstbasis, 2023.
2015 – 2025
Selected solo and group exhibitions from ten years — in the white cube, in public space, and on the blockchain. Mostly shown as solo presentations, in a few cases in collaboration. Assembled from the documentation of each show.
curation & projects
positions gathers the exhibitions of the past years in one place. The same material runs across the rooms: the language of the platform, the screen as a painting ground, economy as a subject, and the sentence on the wall that sounds like advertising and means the opposite. The white cube and public space are treated alike, as display.
The details of venue, year and photography are taken from the archive of each show. The accompanying texts are offered as a reading — an interpretation of the works, not the official description of the exhibition.
2025 · kunsthalle.köln — group exhibition
A group exhibition at kunsthalle.köln, a digital exhibition architecture for digital art sited at Ebertplatz in Cologne, curated by Stefanie Klingemann. Kuhlmann shows a wall of screen and print works from the ongoing body of work. Embedded in the presentation is the sub-project NFT Talkie Walkies, made together with the art and media theorist Hans Ulrich Reck: instead of the visual unique, an edition of three spoken lectures, anchored as NFTs on the blockchain and available at €20 each — Reck speaks, Kuhlmann takes on concept, interface design and the minting. The lectures circle around image and medium, the archive and its promise of eternity, and the question of art, technology and a possible humanism today.
Digital exhibition space at Ebertplatz · curated by Stefanie Klingemann · NFT Talkie Walkies with Hans Ulrich Reck
2025 · Falko Alexander Gallery, Cologne
A collaboration with the painter and sculptor Dennis Rudolph at the Cologne gallery Falko Alexander, opening 13 February 2025. The exhibition asks whether the West has declined into a set of faded idols, and proposes that technology breeds new forms of existence — users as cyborg-like beings in need of new gods, with the corporations of Silicon Valley as a modern Olympus. Rudolph contributes DAS PORTAL — At the End of the World, a VR reimagining of Rodin's Gates of Hell that opens a portal from Cologne to the Mojave desert and the unfinished utopia of California City, anchored in the room by a cast bronze bust. Kuhlmann answers with his Metamodern Trigrams — digital collages built from the binary figures of the I Ching in red, green and blue. Between the weight of the sculpture and the cold light of the screen the common line holds: The West is Dead, Long Live the West.
Falko Alexander — Western Gods ↗ Dennis Rudolph — The Portal ↗
Photos: Fotostudio Helle Kammer · with Dennis Rudolph
2023 · Kunstbasis, Ebertplatz Cologne — group exhibition
Within the group exhibition Kunstbasis at Ebertplatz, Kuhlmann was strongly present in public space. The shop windows and passages of the Ebertplatz underpass became carriers for text works: Consciousness as an Interface, It's Learning to Think — How Will You Colab, No More Dreams / Just Reality. The sentences stand where displays and advertising usually hang, borrowing their tone in order to tip it over. The site itself — a passage between platform, shopfronts and square — becomes a comment on a public sphere that has turned into an interface.
Photos: Martin Plüddemann
2022 · Falko Alexander Gallery, Cologne
A solo exhibition whose title quotes the imperative of the network: only what has been photographed and shared counts as having happened. The white cube fills with the iconography of the forums — Chad and Soyboy, galaxies, meme faces — across wallpapers, floor works and screens. Your deep will to submit, Do You Still Trust Me / Asking for the Friend, Only the Bots Know the Truth: sentences that carry the language of the platform into the exhibition room, where their tenderness and their threat unfold at once. The show weighs what remains of an event when its proof becomes more important than the event itself.
Photos: Marta Vovk
2019 · Falko Alexander Gallery, Cologne
A solo exhibition about the language of the platform and the wish to be free within it. Framed emoticons — :-), LOL, :-( — hang like a new alphabet of feeling; a bracket pair, { }, is captioned This Is Not a Hug. On the wall the sentence Someone Made a Very Disturbing Comment Under My Post; on the floor and against the walls the screens, one of them insisting that Only the Bots Know the Truth. A grid of framed prints doubles from two to five hundred and twelve — an artgame as a capitalistic ritual. The room reads as the inside view of a consciousness that has learned to think in the categories of the interface.
Falko Alexander Gallery, Cologne
2017 · Tiefgarage am Ebertplatz, Cologne
A solo presentation with performance and talk in the exhibition space of the Tiefgarage at Ebertplatz. On the wall the statement Art Was a Joke and the Bourgeoisie Has No Irony; in the room the founding of the International Non Society — "founded by the Friends of Non in July 2017 in Cologne" — and the stacked aluminium cans Metamodern Sein Jetzt. Running alongside is the conceptual fiction of performing the figure Florian Kuhlmann live one last time, in order to hand its further development over to a cloud-based bot network. The show plays with authorship, irony and the disappearance of the artist behind his own figure.
Photos: Alec Crichton
2015 · Galerie am Meer, Düsseldorf
The solo exhibition of 9 October 2015, strictly conceptual and built for the white cube. In the first room the typographic text installation CTRL-S: three almost identical sentences in black letters on a white wall — "'JPG' written in black Arial on white canvas saved as png.gif". In the second room the video projection CTRL-S RGB, which carries the same form into the colour space of red, green and blue, so that colour word and colour never coincide. It is about control, safety and image — and about saving as an everyday gesture of a society that looks for security in the saving of pictures.
Photos: Lars Klostermann
projects — floriankuhlmann.com