Feral Within: Raffael Bader

Fred Levine is excited to announce a first solo exhibition and representation of Leipzig-based painter Raffael Bader.

Bader brings together new work that explore what he explains as a search for a hidden yet an always present, inner wilderness.

Bader’s paintings are grounded in a deeply personal inquiry: the search for a world that lies beneath the highly developed rational mind- a space of untamed potential, raw emotion, and archaic freedom. Working with natural phenomena that are both within us and around us, his art becomes a site for tracing connections between the feral self and the living landscape.

"It’s a questioning," Bader reflects, "but it’s also an act of doing something inherently abstract as painting always is,  to sense the wild that lies within me, I want the nature of painting itself to remain visible in the work. The paint represents itself, while also pointing beyond itself. Both perspectives are real, both are legitimate."

The exhibition features works such as Lavender at the Edge of the World, a meditation on resilience and beauty in unexpected places. Here, beauty is not merely ornamental; it’s an emergent force at the threshold between safety and the abyss. In the work titled, In the End the Bush Burns Down V, fire is a symbol of transformation - a consuming, nonjudgmental energy that destroys to prepare the ground for something new.

Across these works, Bader invites viewers to consider the landscapes we carry within us: fertile, chaotic, and vivid inner worlds shaped by emotion, memory, and nature itself. His compositions oscillate between stillness and movement, figuration and abstraction, evoking forests, oceans, mountains, and the shifting light of imagined places.

"We all carry an inner garden, an inner landscape," Bader says. "It’s brutal and beautiful at once. The wilderness is there, in us, in every person, in every place"