Gathering is pleased to announce New Old Stock, Sebastian Riemer’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view 4 December 2025–31 January 2026 at Gathering London. The show debuts a new series of pixelated prints, alongside existing work that deconstruct photographic image making to highlight markings of age and deterioration – what Riemer calls “photographic ruins”.

The first series viewers encounter in the gallery is Stills, a series Riemer created from slides formerly used for teaching academic art history. In high magnification, Stills traverses the canon of postwar art presenting it as, at once, something to be memorialised but also in a material state of decay. The series reformats and amplifies works by celebrated artists, like Georges Seurat, Mark Rothko and Jeff Wall, for educational purposes, proposing a different point of view to this iconic imagery.

Selected Works (6 images)

Riemer’s new series titled Screens features prints that display a handful of pixels, blown up to giant scale to make visible their brilliant colours and geometric patterns. Out of this blurry gridlock emerge organic visions that verge on the psychedelic. To make the Screens prints, Riemer strips down stock images to a few pixels; then, using rudimentary algorithms, he creates new images out of nearly non-existent visual data. Without using artificial intelligence tools, Screens engages with the randomness of the AI image generation. The result is a fragment of an image that becomes a new work of art entirely: a plastic abstraction transformed from a narrative image into a purely aesthetic composition.

A bird cage, a speed skater and an El Lissitzky artwork are some of the subjects featured in Press Paintings, a series Riemer started over ten years ago. The artist re-photographs vintage prints from the 1920s – 1960s, which he then enlarges in high resolution. While Press Paintings exposes the limits of durability and reproducibility of analogue image carriers, the artist focuses the viewer’s gaze onto these markings, details and gestures of time to render them visible in an almost painterly quality. Doing so, Riemer blurs the boundaries between painting and photography, cultivating layers of artistry that challenge the documentary tradition of photography and place more of an emphasis on the physical fate of the prints. The series plays with the tradition of glamorous old Hollywood portraits, with figures and subjects starkly enlarged so they can be viewed as completely new. This technique shifts the focus to the photographic medium’s claim to objectivity and notions of authorship.

Art historical slides, pixelated mosaics and cinematic iconography converge as Riemer reformulates how the viewer sees and interprets images by taking them out of context and presenting them anew. In an era where photographs can be endlessly manipulated digitally, the three series presented in New Old Stock explore the reverberations of image manipulation and interrogate current technologies to expose these internal workings. While images today can be captured or generated with the push of a button, Riemer’s works serve as reminders of the laborious nature of traditional photography. Like a sort of media archeologist, Riemer disrupts the promise of authenticity that photography grants; rather, he disconnects the image from its original subject matter to instead concentrate on texture, marks, retouching, dust, text – in short, what else there is.