leiser als laut / TORRANO ainara (painting) & WOHLFARTH tina (mezzotint)

26 September - 11 October 2025

ONE WEEK SHOW Nr. 4

TORRANO ainara – painting

It is a typical sign of communication in this day and age that a lack of conviction goes hand in hand with an excess of staged conspicuousness. Anything that is not strong enough in terms of insight or imagination is presented in a louder, shrill, larger and more provocative manner. The artist mainly shows new works that need no passionate justification. They are large, magnificent, and can afford to be quiet, quiet to the point of being unspoken and calm in minimal gestures to the effect of a well-placed silence that defends inner peace against external noise; works that are quieter than loud. Ainara Torrano explores identities in a representational and figurative manner (oil on canvas). The masquerades, role-plays, daydreams, twilight states and self-experiments of the protagonists stagger between artificial pose and self-forgetfulness. The observer feels a combination of curiosity and empathy. He is conspiratorially connected to the scene and the characters, drawn into the moods, tensions, constellations and delicious fantasies – and ultimately into the question of how a person becomes what he is.

This dimension is contemplatively subdued, lightened by desaturated colours in mild, soft, airy pastels of pink, light blue and sulphur yellow, and the reduced action is narrated in a whisper. These are snapshots of the moment of understanding. Of what? One senses it. And one also senses the small, hidden monstrosities.

WOHLFARTH tina - mezzozint

Quieter than loud – that sounds as if you could increase the effect by reducing the means. You can! Quiet tones can be surprisingly powerful and strangely sublime amid the din of wild cries. In this sense, Tina Wohlfarth's works assert themselves clearly, unchallenged and confidently in the contemporary art market with its superlatives and excesses. The artist acts with a strikingly quiet modesty. The Cocon is at the centre of the new works: a large-format mezzotint, supplemented with colour and metal pigments and other elements, inserted into elaborate embossed printing and finished with filigree paper cut passages. The work is simply a universe that the artist has been working on since 2019. And it is an event in its combination of very old but highly effective – and rare! – artistic techniques that immediately attract the viewer's attention. At first glance simply a depicted hoodie, Der Cocon is the highly complex form of a portrait without a face. The intertwining of divergent techniques greatly expands the stylistics of modern forms of representation. The complementary works on display also provide insight into artistic forms of expression that have once again been taken to extremes. The works presented in the current show are also a continuation of the large work groups Ophelia and human landscapes.