The Berlin based Iranian artist Nader is showing his large-format paintings and a block of forty drawings at Kunsthalle St. Gallen. His project Was hilft alle Moral ohne das, was metaphysisch ist («What use is all morality without that which is metaphysical») is centered around the two philosophical themes he has set: history and nature. And although Nader's painting is completely detached from a basic philosophical knowledge and asserts its own position, a quotation from Schelling is nevertheless not without significance for the comprehension of this exhibition: «Nature is the Ilias and history the Odyssey of the spirit». Nader's personal history, that is based on drastic political changes and a resulting critical attitude towards ideological-structural conditions, has paved him a special relationship to the philosophy of the Occident. He belongs to a young generation of painters who are no longer interested in an ideological confrontation with the medium. For this reason, Nader makes use of a wide variety of techniques, for what is important to him above all is the content, and he finds this in the preoccupation with questions of being, as philosophy has always thematized them. The painterly and narrative moments of his pictorial worlds meet with a conceptual understanding of painting, in the center of which is a content-oriented discourse.