The exhibition “Windstille Nacht” brings together two extraordinary Berlin-based painters, Ewa Finn (born 1979 in Warsaw) and Katharina Poos (born 1961 in Berlin), whose works explore the subtle, the uncanny, and the psychology of the unknown.
Image gallery
Zitadelle Spandau
The artists invite viewers to visually glide over motifs, visual references, and allegorically charged symbols, without seeking to define themselves thematically or in terms of content. Rather, their canvas paintings and drawings are ambiguous in the best sense of the word, as they articulate a (re)cognizable visual canon that nevertheless consistently eludes precise interpretation.
Characteristic of Ewa Finn’s painting style are her monumental and often dark-toned pictorial spaces, in which all living beings—whether human figures or animals—appear to us largely adrift and lost. They find their communicative counterpart not so much outside the picture in the viewer, but rather in an inner dialogue with themselves, a conversation with an unclear counterpart.
In a similarly unbound and freely intertwined manner, Katharina Poos places her chimera-like figures on mostly untreated monochromatic canvas. Their bodies—partly overlapping, partly interpenetrating—are often sketched solely through subtle contours in light colors. And yet a hint of physical threat and existential distress hovers around them when situations turn violent, when grimaces or weapons appear in the images.
In the works of both Ewa Finn and Katharina Poos, the figures move almost somnambulistically through symbolic pictorial spaces that offer no actual physical space. Rather, their intensity stems from both conscious and unconscious reminiscences of religious motifs, the visual worlds of Romanticism, or contemporary press photographs.
