A Twist in the Tale

About

Before the first word, there was a story.
It did not seek to be told, nor did it need to be understood.
Unfolding over time, it was certain of one thing:
the past is gone, and the future remains unknown.
In that instant, a twist was born.

Stories like that want to be told. They crave beginnings, middles, and ends.
Paintings defy such narratives. They speak in fragments, ruptures, absences, and disjunctions.

The group exhibition A Twist in the Tale brings together eight artists – Okka-Esther Hungerbühler, Kallirroi Ioannidou, Aneta Kajzer, Tim Leimbach, Tom Król, Linou Meyer, Solveig Schmid, and Marta Vovk – who approach painting as a process, an event, and a space where storytelling drifts in gestures rather than sequences.

A misplaced colour, a dissolving figure, or a persistence of line—these are not mere details but bold interventions. The works do not evolve in the linear fashion that narrative requires but exist in a state of tension, where meaning remains on the threshold—just as the paintings themselves hover between abstraction and figuration, the forms between presence and absence, the gestures between control and surrender, and the space between surface and depth.

In this delicate interplay, the paint becomes both a witness and a testament to alteration, revealing, through its traces and layers, the ongoing process of transformation. The forms communicate—sometimes with the familiarity of everyday signs, sometimes as fragmented silhouettes, isolated shapes, or excessive lines. Resisting the temptation of clarity, the unfilled space is by no means a void; rather, it invites the viewer to fill in the unknown, shaping an ever-expanding field of interpretations. There is both an immediacy to the process—sometimes impulsive, sometimes calculated—and a quiet invitation to look again, to reconsider. The paintings are therefore not an endpoint but a point of departure, sparking conversations that stretch beyond the frame.

In this way, the exhibition becomes a space of destabilisation, where change is the only constant. The artist’s hand is always present, but it does not dictate. Instead, it coexists with the flickering agency of the viewer, whose gaze is neither neutral nor passive. We bring histories, assumptions, fleeting moods. We see through the filters of memory and expectation. And here, the image itself is never still. It destabilises, resists capture, refuses the illusion of a singular, resolved meaning—and this is precisely where the twist and the power of these works lie.