In a revisionist reassessment of classic modernism, Matthias Bitzer (b. Stuttgart, 1975; lives and works in Berlin) combines portraiture with geometric construction, often drawing on the formal vocabulary, plots, and intellectual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work in media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and site-specific installation art speaks a characteristic symbolic language. Interweaving the lives of prominent figures like Anita Berber, Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, Leopoldo Fregoli, Fernando Pessoa, and Arthur Schnitzler with his own...