New Paintings brings together the work of Romain Löser and Systems Research Group, accompanied by a text by Yaniya Lee. The exhibition explores the color blue through some of its symbolic associations: liquidity, transcendence, and, more recently, “Big Blue,” the nickname for IBM. Instead of taking place at GUTS, the exhibition occupies an apartment rendered uninhabitable by water damage, an unexpected backdrop for the show. Blue bottles, served as refeshments at the opening, are all that remain after the public’s visit on the first day.

Systems Research Group paints on precarious, improvised supports, and derive their motifs from the IBM logo, transforming a familiar corporate image into abstraction. In contrast, Romain Löser works with watercolor and paper inlays. He juxtaposes the marks and traces left by water drops on paper with printed views of water drops magnifying screen pixels. Yaniya Lee’s accompanying text, “Methylene Blue,” unfolds as an associative essay, tracing the cultural and political trajectories of blue—from pigments and medicine to IBM, colonialism, race, and digital culture.

Rather than offering an interpretive framework, the text and the exhibition position blue as a material, historical, and ideological construct.