Monika Baer, Sanya Kantarovsky & Amelie von Wulffen

3 NOV until 19 DEC 2026

Painting is a psychological landscape as much as a visual one. Each painting in this exhibition seems to have traversed the undulating terrain of a mind – perhaps sequestered for some time in the switchbacking roads of neuroses, or swept over by waves of subconscious. These works fold in the history of the medium and carry it into new territory. Baer, Kantarovsky and von Wulffen each take different routes, but some things are shared. Self-reflexivity is one – and this trait is directed towards both the painter’s position and translated into painting itself. In this inquiry, all three cite personal and art histories, questioning the status and efficacy of the medium and their relationships to it.

Monika Baer asks paint to perform as a caricature of itself or role play as its less deified neighbors – like stucco or grout – collapsing the literal and symbolic. The three works in this exhibition examine the painting from unorthodox perspectives, in which the act of looking at a painting is reflected, subverted or redirected. Rear painting seems to offer up with the title suggests: a view from the back of the canvas rather than the front, replete with a choice of viewpoints out, rather than just one.

Sanya Kantarovsky’s subjects often land in the overlap between oppositional concepts. Expressions are frozen between meekness and combativeness, showmanship and introversion. A pallid face, so kneaded by hard times, looks beyond hope, but still possesses a flicker of a knowing smirk. Paint sits in this limbo too – gleefully positioned at the border of depiction and abstraction. Daubs of color serve as cherry blossoms and horseflies alike; and viscus paint, stretched to a watery breaking point somehow performs perfectly as bristly fur.

Amelie von Wulffen stacks the windows, screens, and frames of history and imagination into a painterly matrix that overlays memory, fantasy and history. Arrays of vignettes recall childhood curiosity and abject reality side by side. In Hydra a terse Zoom call unfolds in front of a scenic harbor that could either be the stuff of Monet or a high flying tourist tchotchke painting. Also unfurling is a seductive, ribbon-rinded lemon possibly pulled from a Dutch still life. A nightmarish Madonna and child stare out from the laptop, with its disintegrating keyboard beginning to resemble a grid of windows into hell.

These artists engage with painting as a framework to convey psychological complexity, demonstrating its ability to reflect and distort life, history, and memory in such delicate combination so as to fire some new synaptic connection – a spark of novel experience that shakes the rust off of the brain. They share an existential conviction in the medium and a mutual appreciation for the endeavor of coaxing it again and again into a new conversation. In this dialogue, questions are exposed and answers are offered, but sheerly for the sake of expanding the territory.