Private View: Thursday, 20th of February 2025, 6 - 8pm Berlin
Bianca Barandun, Kim Booker, Carri, Saskia Fleishman, Michelle Jezierski, Anne Griffiths, Alessandro Keegan and Thomas Trum
Ethereal, a group exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, brings together some of the most exciting artists working with abstraction today. The show considers how the abstract style has provided fertile ground for artists throughout history, inviting a playful approach to materiality, symbolism and texture, with particular attention paid to emotional states, rhythm and ephemerality. Exploring everything from memory and spirituality to our relationship with everyday objects, architecture and nature, Ethereal invites us to pay closer attention to the world around us.
Working at the intersection of print, drawing and sculpture, Swiss artist Bianca Barandun seeks to capture complex emotions through colour and forms. For this exhibition, she presents a ceramic sculpture from her ongoing ‘Silos’ series, for which she interviews people about their memories, asking them to describe only the visual aspects. She then translates these details into a code, exploring how language affects not only the ways in which we communicate recollections, but the act of remembering itself. Meanwhile, a pair of suspended sculptures titled Adélie, investigates how materials and forms interact within space. Mexican artist Carri is also interested in the emotional language of material. Her ceramic and stone sculptures contrast fragmented and smooth, fluid forms that reflect her own psychological states while also capturing the complex and ephemeral nature of emotions.
The spiraling structures of Saskia Fleishman’s ceramic sculptures are inspired by forms and forces from nature such as twisted driftwood, shells, volcanic rock, whirlpools, and weather systems while iridescent colour tones evoke light, heat, the movement of different energies. Seeking to capture the ‘essence of nature’, her works have an almost talismanic quality. Anne Griffiths’ paintings also look to nature through the lens of physical and emotional experiences. She paints transient moments, at dawn or dusk, when there’s ‘an other-worldly feeling in the air… when shapes transform and a velvety richness rolls over the world.’ Into the Gloaming, for instance, captures the feeling of walking into a forest, the ways in which the world appears to shift and reassemble as your eyes adjust to the dark while the plum hues of Wine-Fueled Embrace evoke the lingering blush of a sunset.
In three paintings by Kim Booker we encounter naked female figures, drawn in charcoal within shivering, dappled landscapes that are inspired by the changing moods and colour palettes of the seasons. A mix of intense and earthy colours, rough, textured lines and quick gestural brushstrokes work to create an erotically-charged atmosphere, a sense of possibility and transition. Michelle Jezierski is similarly interested in how art can capture the feeling of a place or a state of being. Her paintings play with light and space, broken apart with lines of pastel chalk and repeated elements that evoke the idea of never-ending movement, of rushing, swirling, glitching, of being caught up in a storm, a thought process, of being overwhelmed by sensation.
Dutch artist Thomas Trum is fascinated by the idea of leaving behind traces. His experiments with space, material, colour and rhythm seek to discover new ways of creating images. For this exhibition, he presents three paintings made using a self-developed giant felt-tip pen. Geometric shapes in vivid shades of blue, orange and green splay out across the canvases in diaphanous layers that appear to rotate before the eye. Alessandro Keegan also plays with our sensory perception. The floating orbs and shimmering droplets in his paintings may appear surreal but they are inspired by microscopic images and real-life natural processes. The works in this show specifically reflect on the transformations that are taking place as a result of environmental change, the process of destruction and creation, of the world being made and undone.
By translating personal experiences, natural phenomena and societal shifts into tangible forms, the artists of Ethereal encourage us to consider not only the beauty of what is seen but also the unseen rhythms, energies and impermanence that shape our world. In doing so, they offer a quiet but powerful call to be present, to attune ourselves to the delicate interplay between the physical and the ephemeral, and to reflect on the ever-changing landscape of both the natural world and human consciousness.
