Artists

Kateryna Lysovenko, Francis Offman, Hilda Kortei, Ad Minoliti

Press release

The golden hour is momentary. In this exhibition, that succinctness becomes the central condition. Each work holds light at the edge of disappearance, and the show unfolds as an unfinished script, its scenes assembled but never resolved. Kateryna Lysovenko opens with the language of monumental painting turned against its own history. Trained in a tradition built for ideology, she thins it into translucence: oil handled like watercolour, bodies as glazes of rose and crimson through which the interior remains visible. In How strong hearts can be broken, a torso opens like a reliquary; tenderness becomes anatomical. Mermaids embrions suspends new life in the water of dusk, creatures that, in Ukrainian folklore, only the innocent can see. At the same time, Das Leben in den Taschen names her condition of production: a life carried in pockets, paradise as portable property. Hers is the last light in which an idyll can still be defended. Hilda Kortei answers in the opposite tempo: improvisation, not monument. Her surfaces are collaged, hand-sewn, layered with spray paint, oil stick and glitter, built the way a phrase is built in scat singing: broken open, reassembled, left ringing. Her titles perform the same interruption. black. Thus, ends on a comma; Speech whatever shrugs off its own eloquence; Short duration names the hour itself, while No prize steps off the wall entirely, refusing the trophy logic of completion. Her golden hour is a duration made material in which glitter catches the light; the painting stays open the way dusk keeps the day open, a moment longer. Into this light, Ad Minoliti releases the animals. Coming from geometric abstraction’s Latin American lineage, Minoliti carries it into fable: hard-edge geometry softens into coloured pencil, triangles grow eyes, a fox slips past a tree, Violeta drinks from a flower. Zorrx and Many, furry beings beyond gender and species, stand among the works as the exhibition’s viewers: geometry embodied, utopia in plush. Theirs is the hour of encounter, when daylight loosens and other creatures come out. Francis Offman closes the day with what it leaves behind. Coffee grounds gathered from friends, ink, resins on jacquard; a slow, almost old-masterly economy in which nothing is bought and nothing wasted. His umber fields are abstraction as sediment: each surface holds the hands, kitchens and conversations it passed through, the colonial history of coffee ground into pigment. His golden hour is the residue at the bottom of the cup, evening’s true colour. Rose, gold, ultramarine, umber. Four characters meet at the golden hour, each carrying a secret the others suspect. The script stays open, the constellation unresolved, and as with every rendezvous in this light, a deep shadow arrives with it. Text: Sophie Goltz