DC Open 2026: RizzutoGallery presents Two Artists, One Studio

An open studio with Mattia Barbieri and Metin Çelik in Düsseldorf.

From 4 to 6 September 2026, during DC Open, RizzutoGallery Düsseldorf will transform its exhibition space into a temporary shared studio. Two Artists, One Studio brings together Mattia Barbieri and Metin Çelik, inviting visitors to encounter artistic production not as a finished result, but as a living, unfolding process.

For three days, the gallery at Ackerstraße 34, Düsseldorf, will become a space of work, exchange and observation. Barbieri and Çelik will work side by side, maintaining their individual practices while sharing the same environment, time and attention. Works in progress will coexist with completed pieces, alongside sketches, books, notes, materials and tools.

The project offers an unusually direct view of the artist’s studio: a place of experimentation, hesitation, repetition and discovery. Visitors will be able to enter freely, spend time in the space, speak with the artists and observe the gestures, decisions and changes that accompany the making of an artwork. As the setting will evolve throughout the three days, each visit will reveal a partially transformed studio.

Mattia Barbieri’s practice moves across painting, drawing and sculpture. Born in Brescia, he lives and works between Milan and New York. His paintings bring together fragments of art history, popular culture, collective imagery and personal mythology on a single, densely layered surface. Rather than organising these elements around one dominant subject, Barbieri creates compositions in which multiple centres coexist. Images are deconstructed, reassembled and translated into a hybrid visual language that keeps the boundary between painting and sculpture deliberately open.

Metin Çelik was born in Adana and lives and works in Mönchengladbach. His paintings focus on the relationship between modern humanity and nature, the desire for domination, memory and militarism. Figures stripped of expression appear within intensely coloured and deliberately theatrical compositions. Influenced by the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht, Çelik uses estrangement as a critical device: his images resist immediate identification and invite the viewer to question the scene rather than simply enter it.

Although the two artists work through distinct languages, their practices meet in an interest in the instability of images and in the conditions through which they acquire meaning. Barbieri’s expansive, multi-layered surfaces and Çelik’s charged, estranged figures both encourage the viewer to look beyond a first impression. In Two Artists, One Studio, this dialogue extends from the finished work to the space and time of its production.

Following the open-studio weekend, works by both artists will remain on view at RizzutoGallery Düsseldorf until 24 October 2026.

Opening hours during DC Open
Friday, 4 September: 6–9 pm
Saturday, 5 September: 11 am–7 pm
Sunday, 6 September: 11 am–5 pm
After DC Open
The exhibition will be open on Fridays from 4–6 pm and Saturdays from 11 am–1 pm, or by appointment.

RizzutoGallery Düsseldorf
Ackerstraße 34
40233 Düsseldorf, Germany
+49 (0) 157 73718369
www.rizzutogallery.com