EN/NL

Through the Looking Glass – Gunilla Jähnichen
13 May to 10 June 2023

Opening on Saturday 13 May from 4-6pm.
In the presence of the artist.

‘Through the Looking-Glass ‘, the title of the first solo exhibition of German artist Gunilla Jähnichen (°1972), at gallery with tsjalling, refers to the second book of Alice in Wonderland. In that book, Alice discovers a world where, like a mirror image, everything is reversed, including logic, and the exhibition title is therefore a metaphor for every time the world suddenly seems unfamiliar, almost as if things are turned upside down.

Gunilla Jähnichen filters out the essence of emotions in her works, she simplifies forms and expresses feelings like anger, joy or fear very directly in her paintings. She approaches emotion very directly with powerful colours. For the intense colour effect, Jähnichen uses pigmented, luminous acrylic paint on canvas and ink on paper. The imagery moves between figuration and its disintegration. Colour areas, lines and stains, applied in multiple layers, translucent and vibrating, are the starting point of her associatively effective depiction of human-like figures. In doing so, they seem to reference the use of emojis as cartoonishly abbreviated messages of emotional states.

In recent years, the German/Swedish artist has exhibited widely in galleries throughout Germany, in Italy, Sweden and the UK, and last December participated in ‘Copy/Paste’ at gallery with tsjalling. She received her education at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg.