The Spirit is Weak But the Flesh is Willing is an exhibition catalogue published to accompany the solo exhibition of new paintings by the Berlin-based artist Martin Eder on show at HENI Gallery, London, in collaboration and support of Newport Street Gallery. Published in a black fabric hardcover with black foil text, the catalogue includes a conversation with Martin Eder, Damien Hirst and Tim Marlow. Eder’s paintings examine beauty and ugliness, depicting kittens and wide-eyed puppies alongside uncompromising nudes and more sinister and surreal encounters. The new series of paintings describe a descent into hell – as in Dante’s Inferno – into the deeper regions of the subconscious mind and its dreams. Martin Eder‘s work can be read as a coded irony, a melancholic intermediary stage in the cosmos of New Objectivity, sharp, cynical, anti-attitude, contemporary figurative painting and installation. He is concerned with the issues of metaphysics: the quest for the cognition of the underlying structure and the principles of reality. The works are full of hidden meanings, secret messages, stories and unsolved mysteries. There is a sense of something uncanny lurking behind each and every corner. In the title of the show, which is a reversal of the well-known biblical quote, the artist says he is attempting to describe the post-pandemic state of mind in which find ourselves.