With “In lowly garb,” Cécile Lempert presents a new body of work at CASTLE, her first solo exhibition in the United States. The title of the show quotes a Protestant Advent hymn based on a poem by Friedrich Rückert that begins: “Your King comes In lowly garb,/He is carried by the burdened foal,/Receive Him joyfully, Jerusalem!” These lines capture a central theme of the exhibition: how can philosophical and religious traditions produce both meaningful values and dangerous ideologies? Lempert engages with the ambiguities of her family’s Kantian-Lutheran heritage and its ideological impact on both her present personal life and broader society - shaping ideals such as modesty, individual moral responsibility, loyalty to principles, and reason, while simultaneously providing an ideological foundation for Christian nationalism, war apologetics, and authoritarianism.
At the center of the exhibition are two portraits of my great-grandfather, Paul Horn, a grammar school teacher and pious Lutheran who volunteered enthusiastically for the First World War but soon returned wounded. As a traumatized participant, he struggled throughout his life to make sense of the deaths of the fallen, as documented in several publications from the 1920s and 1930s—two of which are on display. In these texts, he grapples with profound questions: How can we find meaning in senseless death? What makes a life - or a sacrifice - worthwhile?
His answer draws on Kantian philosophy: what matters is not the outcome of our actions, but the moral principles behind them. We are, he writes, “in this world only dust”, and must “die off” with all we have to be “seized by god” - we must not become too attached to worldly concerns, merely “vegetating” like animals at a trough. It is a philosophy of self-denial, duty, and transcendence; yet Horn simultaneously uses these very ideas - principles over consequences, devotion to higher purpose, rejection of material comfort - to justify rightist, authoritarian politics.
These portraits reveal their historic, documentary character through precise sparseness. They show a middle-aged man with a stern, perhaps even threatening expression who both commands attention and yet seems completely distant. In both portraits, Paul Horn dominates the foreground while his daughter is pushed to the edge and into the background, creating not just individual portraits but a study of a father-daughter relationship, a reflection on family hierarchy and traditional masculinity.
Both works are diptychs, each pairing the portrait with a second panel in strikingly different ways. In the first, the portrait sits alongside a panel based on Edward Steichen’s 1904 photograph of a park with blossoming chestnut trees. This pastoral scene lends the composition a gentler touch, functioning as a visual space for contemplation and anchoring the work to a more distant past. In the second diptych, Advent 1936, the portrait is paired with close-up details from the same family photograph: the modest yet bourgeois table setting, the chain of his pocket watch. Through this almost microscopic focus on seemingly minor details, Lempert draws historic and psychological significance from what might otherwise be overlooked.
Lempert juxtaposes these historical portraits with a split-screen portrait of me looking closely at an altarpiece by German Gothic painter Stefan Lochner. This vastly larger-than-life image, shown in full profile and intense color, contrasts sharply with the spare black-and-white photographs from the 1930s. Positioned to face toward Advent 1936, the contemporary portrait creates a visual conversation across time—an interplay of looks and gestures that connects a young man from the present with a formative family background whose cultural impact still resonates 90 years later.
This visual dialogue between past and present asks: how do we reckon with a family heritage that contains both meaningful values and deeply troubling beliefs? What stance should we take toward our family background when we understand its problematic aspects? Lempert invites us to consider how this Kantian-Lutheran ideology continues to shape our present culture and newly rising fascism we face today.
This contrastive treatment of photographs from 1904 to 2024 leads to another central theme of the exhibition, picking up a strand of Lempert’s earlier work: an exploration of our experience of time, simultaneity, and transience. In a strange way, scenes from the distant past acquire present life while contemporary scenes become historicized through this contrastive hanging, creating an oscillation between closeness and distance.
This negotiation of time and transience finds its fullest expression in the final major work of the exhibition: Lupinen, a large-scale triptych depicting a field of lupine flowers, greatly enlarged and abstracted, with shifts between the three panels that show repeated patterns without falling into any clear geometric relations, like the motion of the sea. Against the weight of ideology and family history, the work offers a meditation on natural cycles and impermanence—a visual breath amid the exhibition’s more fraught questions.
Cécile Lempert (b. 1994, Dortmund, Germany) lives and works in Cologne, Germany. She studied fine arts at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2014 to 2021 under Prof. Peter Piller and Prof. Stefan Kürten. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: roubled at his saying at IAH Gallery, Seoul (2025); A provisional topography, a two-artist show with Hirakari Ono, at xyz collective, Tokyo (2025); Splits and Screens at Elsa Meunier, Paris (2025) An evening far at Super Super Markt, Berlin (2024); Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again, curated by Miriam Bettin, at BRAUNSFELDER, Cologne (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Portraits at BRAUNSFELDER, Cologne (2025); Nemesis at YveYANG Gallery, New York (2024); Timespaces at Elsa Meunier, Paris (2024); Beeldhonger - Hunger nach Bildern at Museum No Hero, Delden (2024); Polyphonic Resonance at Chung Art Museum, Shanghai (2024). Lempert participated in the Aqtushetil Artist Residency in Omalo, Georgia (2019) and completed an exchange at the Royal College of Arts, London. She founded the exhibition space AURA in Dusseldorf in 2021 and has recieved multiple scholarships including the MKW Stipendium Auf Geht’s (2020,2021) and the Deutschland Stipendium (2019). Her work is held in collections including the Braunsfelder Family Collection, Cologne, and the Museum No Hero, Delden.
In lowly garb
October 11 – November 8, 2025