Lehmann Maupin presents Alex Hank’s first solo exhibition in Asia, featuring a focused selection of five graphite portrait drawings. Executed on locally sourced birchwood collected from the artist’s barn in the Swiss Alps, the works foreground drawing as both an act of construction and an intimate mode of looking. In this presentation, Hank turns inward, concentrating on the human figure as a site where precision, vulnerability, and psychological tension converge.

The medium itself plays a central role in this inquiry. Birchwood lends the portraits a palpable sense of weight and resistance, reinforcing the corporeal presence of the sitters. The pronounced woodgrain, suggestive of human veins, operates not merely as support but as an active compositional ground. In contrast, graphite brings in delicacy and immediacy, retaining the spontaneity of works on paper even at a commanding scale. This interplay between softness and structure mirrors the subtle negotiations of identity, power, and intimacy that animate the drawings. Through this material tension, the figures emerge as self-possessed yet vulnerable. Often absorbed in their interior worlds, they resist full access. Hank’s sustained attention to his subjects is evident; intimacy surfaces as the sitters withhold as much as they reveal, generating a charged space between privacy and the artist’s impulse to observe.