Switzerland, Canada, Israel, The Netherlands, The United States). Main exhibitions during that period included Family Papers (It's Me: Auto/Biography), 2005, at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; Homescapes, 2007, at The Heder Gallery, Tel Aviv; Displacements, 2007, at the Bat Yam Museum of Contemporary Art; The Rear, 2007, at The first Herzliya Biennial; Israeli Art From The Collection, 2007, Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Family, Tree, 2008, at Gallery 39, Tel Aviv; Family Traces, 2009, at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. 2009–2013: From family photographs to imagination In early 2009, Kühnemann had his first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany, titled Schichten (layers). Several of the paintings in the exhibition had already been displayed in different exhibitions in Israel; others were created for this purpose. The exhibition was held at the Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery in Bielefeld and was accompanied by a comprehensive catalog in German and English. Kühnemann's intense interest in family photographs spurred in him curiosity regarding his family and cultural roots, and alongside his attempt to push his artistic and professional limits, this lead him to move to his mother's hometown, Berlin. His geographic relocation was accompanied by a transformation in his work. The new surroundings and cultural contexts were expressed in an intense search and in experiments conducted in his studio. During these years, he was still using family photographs as his reference, but he was also trying to look for a new, more abstract visual language, one not based on a dictated extrinsic narrative. The main exhibition representing his work during this period is Balancing Acts, 2011, at the Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv. In a review of the exhibition for Haaretz newspaper, Smadar Sheffi wrote: "Olaf Kühnemann's solo exhibition at the Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv, is a sort of group exhibition by one man, in which he exhibits a colorful multiplicity of styles. The proximity between the figurative and abstract in Kühnemann's work is so great, that it seems like this is what he's referring to with the exhibition's name, 'Balancing Acts', alluding to an attempt at creating a general and balancing statement between shape, image and narrative... Kühnemann is not an artist who went through a sharp change of style. Like his paintings, that feel somewhat organic, his work's gradual change as it is presented in this exhibition also holds new possibilities for painting, that Kühnemann has yet to explore." Another major exhibition of