I first met Luzie on May 5th of last year. She was participating in a group reading at Ashley, a non-profit exhibition space on Oranienstraße (not far from Sweetwater, though I didn’t know at the time as I hadn’t rented the space yet). Her selection was an in-progress version of a new work titled I can use eggs however I please. Later that night, another friend texted me that she liked Luzie’s poem, to which I responded that I couldn’t remember which one Luzie’s reading was. “It was the one about private and public, intimacy and diplomacy...” my friend wrote to me, which jogged my memory: “Ah yes yes yes that was my favorite one,” I replied.

Two days earlier, I had met Friedemann for the first time. We were introduced via email by a mutual friend in New York and met at a small restaurant on Schönleinstraße, also nearby the space that would eventually become Sweetwater. Over coffee, I told him about quitting my job in Manhattan and moving from Brooklyn to Berlin, and he told me about searching for an apartment after a brief stint living in Brussels. Sometime in the next few days we followed each other on Instagram and I saw his last two posts, both of watercolors, both reproductions of images of people found on Instagram.

I saw Luzie and Friedemann again and again as the summer went on. I can remember seeing Luzie at a party in Frankfurt and Friedemann at an opening at HKW; I’m sure there’s more that isn’t coming to mind right now. In August, Luzie had another reading in Berlin, this one in the open-air ruins of a large Franciscan church destroyed in WWII. As part of a longer set, she again read I can use eggs however I please, though it was finished now, and more polished than the version I’d heard in May. A month later, I attended the opening of Friedemann’s untitled solo show at Galerie Thomas Fischer, where I saw the two watercolors he had posted on Instagram. The press release, written by his sister Leah, noted that while he had always practiced figurative drawing, these pieces were rarely ever displayed publicly.

My first Berlin summer, an unusually warm and pleasant one, turned to autumn. I went to see Friedemann’s show again before it closed; Luzie came to visit Sweetwater and gave me the text version of her poem. I asked the both of them, separately, whether they would be like to be included in a group show in LA in February. I used the term “group show,” though to be honest, from the beginning I had imagined only a “group” of two. They had never met, but seemed to take a liking to each other’s work and were enthusiastic about having a show together. Over the next months, we discussed the details, often over drinks, sometimes together and sometimes separately – at Ankerklause, at Südblock, in Wedding, in Schöneberg. And so now, please join me here, at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, for More than what I am providing, featuring the work of both Friedemann Heckel and Luzie Meyer.

–L.C.