Self Studies
With works by Karin Kneffel, Jessica Jane Charleston, Jenny Watson, Ambra Durante, Romane Holderried Kaesdorf, Babette Semmer, Caterina Renaux Hering, Asana Fujikawa, Madeline Donahue & Nana Mandl

3 JUL until 29 AUG 2026

The exhibition Self Studies brings together ten artists of different generations whose work is devoted to the exploration of the self across painting, drawing, ceramics and textiles. The body – remembered, desired, shared, politically inscribed – is the starting point: the place where self-perception and the outside gaze converge.

The works unfold a world of experience that is multifaceted and contradictory, shaped by the tension between inner projections and external attribution, between private experience and its social dimension. They open a space in which identity becomes visible in all its fluidity – while questioning inherited conventions of feminine representation that they renegotiate.

KARIN KNEFFEL (*1957) 
The exhibition opens with Karin Kneffel’s paintings of medieval Madonna sculptures with child – as an archetype of feminine representation. It is an act of reappropriation: Kneffel occupies one of the oldest subjects in art history – one that was predominantly represented by men. Her works create a space for dwelling and dissection: painting as condensation and evocation, making the act of looking itself visible.

JESSICA JANE CHARLESTON (*1986)
Jessica Jane Charleston’s work departs from the self-portrait as a form of selfdiscovery. Her line meanders freely, a driving force that gives shape to the many facets of identity and emotion. Charleston’s figures oscillate between human and animal, between the recognisable and the fantastical. Drawing on Surrealist tradition, the act of drawing itself becomes a form of discovery: the line feels its way forward, reveals, discovers. 

JENNY WATSON (*1951)
The work of Australian artist Jenny Watson is shaped by punk and feminism. 
In the 1970s she developed a deliberately naïve, intuitively accessible visual language. On fabric, paper and found materials she paints autobiographical scenes from everyday life, travel, dreams and memory, often accompanied by painted text panels. Self-portraits and horses recur: drawn from her own life, yet familiar as projections of female fantasy. For over five decades, Watson has expanded the narratives of art to include the personal experiences and imagination of women.   

AMBRA DURANTE (*2000) 
Ambra Durante’s works of image and text trace the act of thinking in the attempt to fathom the self. Taking the personal as the starting point of artistic practice, her works speak of the inner states of a young artist and woman. Following the trace of lines, Durante shows how words and images inscribe themselves into – and slip away from – one’s own identity. The self appears provisional: an accumulation of inherited and lived fragments.

ROMANE HOLDERRIED KAESDORF (1922–2007) 
Imbued with a delicate sense of humor and a distinctly idiosyncratic drawing style, Romane Holderried Kaesdorf’s drawings capture the gestures, postures, and actions of a dynamic female body in interaction with everyday objects. 
Her deep engagement with physicality, personal agency, and autonomy places the woman as acting subject at the center – and brings her perspective on the world she inhabits into focus.

BABETTE SEMMER (*1989) 
Babette Semmer works with images from the visual archive of popular culture. Using a distinctive technique of oil paint and sand, she transforms photographic source material into atmospheric situations on canvas – charging them with personal history, shifting contexts, questioning our collective visual memory. Her paintings frequently show women in everyday situations, reflecting the representational conventions and projections of past eras. The granular texture of the sand, reminiscent of analogue photography, makes the intervention legible – creating distance and room for painterly intrusion.

CATERINA RENAUX HERING (*1985)
The work of Brazilian artist Caterina Renaux Hering circles around the female body – as material and image. At the centre of her practice is drawing, from which her work extends into painting, ceramics, costume and performance. In her studio she invents techniques for combining drawings with silicone and resin – sensuous, skin-like materials suspended between objecthood and corporeality. Her visual language recalls classical modernism, yet it is an unmistakably feminine gaze that regards the body – from the inside out, driven by a radical will toward sensuous expression.