Christiane Löhr
Soffuso

1 MAY until 17 JUL 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-9 pm

Christiane Löhr (born 1965, lives and works in Cologne and Prato, Italy) creates a distinctive sculptural and installation-based cosmos using materials drawn from the organic world. Winged seeds, plant stems, burrs and tree blossoms, along with horsehair and the hair of dogs and cats, serve as construction material for her organic-abstract vocabulary of forms. In doing so, she transforms these materials into new sculptural arrangements without altering their inherent structure.

The scale of her works ranges from miniature and medium-sized formats to installations that, in dialogue with their surroundings, can extend across large surfaces and redefine entire spaces. Depending on the character of the materials she carefully “harvests,” exceptionally delicate, condensed structures, as well as more compact formations emerge. In their partly planar and partly voluminous expansion, they recall processes of growth found in nature as well as architectural structures.

Christiane Löhr is considered one of the most important voices in the current discourse on contemporary, time-based approaches to sculpture. Following her widely acclaimed exhibition Ordnung der Wildnis at Haus am Waldsee in 2021, she now returns to Berlin with a solo presentation at Galerie Levy.

For the exhibition, Löhr has selected around twenty works from the past three years, including several newly created pieces. Meticulously arranged in dialogue with one another and with the gallery’s ground and lower floors, the works unfold in a balanced, fluid interplay. In keeping with the title Soffuso, an atmosphere of gentle indeterminacy surrounds visitors. Delicate spirals of feathery forms, permeable fleece-like structures woven from burrs and cat and dog hair, and nets filled with thistle and reed seeds – gathered and clustered like cushions before a large wall – seem to drift softly into the space, only to fade from view again. Even from a distance, the works, delicate at times in scale, are perceptible through their material presence and the subtle shimmer of their varied tones.

Elsewhere, fine translucent lines of horsehair are stretched between needles. Like cryptic ciphers, they lend the walls that support them a subtle air of mystery. Taut and knotted, with an organic inner life, the threads traverse part of a room, connecting wall and pillar, reminiscent of a musical score.

Alongside her sculptural work, drawing has been a central element of Christiane Löhr’s practice from the very beginning. The exhibition also includes several medium-format drawings in oil pastel. The artist rubs the pigment into the paper with her fingers, creating dark, dense clusters of lines that dominate the center or entire sheet, or forming organic shapes that enliven the surface through the contrast of black and white tones. With apparent ease, Löhr moves between two- and three-dimensionality, linking the two in ways that are both dynamic and intricately interwoven.