The Space In-Between: Von Wolfe

PUBLIC OPENING

September 4, 2025, 4 – 9 pm

Avenue Louise 430, Brussels 1050

In the presence of the artist

MARUANI MERCIER is delighted to present The Space In-Between, an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Von Wolfe, opening on 4 September at our Brussels Gallery.

Portraying figures in restrained interiors or expansive landscapes, the works in The Space In-Between evade attribution to a fixed space and time. The works are developed in collaboration with artificial intelligence, but not as mere tools of image generation. Instead, Von Wolfe treats the AI as an errant interlocutor - producing a flood of visual propositions, outliers, and uncanny hybrids. From this visual delirium, the artist isolates moments of particular psychic intensity, reworking them by hand in oil with classical precision. What results is a new kind of mythic realism - one that emerges from the machine’s subconscious and the artist’s instinctual logic.

Compositional elements surrounding the figures, such as toy trains, houses or pearls stand out for their specificity and alluring strangeness, yet remain paradoxically resistant to interpretation. Alluding to a narrative through meticulously detailed forms, each painting hovers over the boundary between the realist and the magical, conjuring the space of profound psychological tension. As the artist notes, “I'm interested in the space in-between things. It doesn't matter which era the objects in the paintings come from, they could be a contemporary jet or a bird cage. What is important to me is that they are not symbols and this frame of reference that they give shouldn't be too fixed, they don't have a fixed meaning.”

Responding to one another through a harmonised palette, the paintings in The Space In-Between construct the vision of a world that subtly deviates from the Newtonian sense of physical space. In Golden Blaze, the figure casts a shadow that appears distanced, as if animated by a distinct presence. She is leaning precariously above a miniature house on fire, its flames abstracted into an almost improbable stillness. By intermingling passages of luminous precision with discreet distortions of the laws of physics, Von Wolfe transforms the composition into a psychological realm, a space of personal interiority and reflection.

In Secret Journey, the protagonist turns elegantly to meet our gaze, her presence and power underscored by the low horizon line evocative of classical portraiture. Her expression of surprise or address, lit at a sharp angle against the velvet dark texture of the empty room, alludes to the sense of psychic tension. The toy train on a chain, seemingly advancing along an incomplete track, emits smoke – a scene of an enigmatic push and pull, frozen in a poignant compositional equilibrium.

Operating in the space between intuitive human discernment and a cutting-edge technology, between creating and finding an image amid the echoes of human knowledge, the artist considers each medium in its own right, distinct, yet harmoniously interconnected. As Von Wolfe explains, “I see the two media as not hierarchical – for me, they're more like a voice and an echo, or a body and a shadow. I wouldn't place somehow the shadow in a lesser place because it doesn't have the physicality of the body, nor the echo in some way as the less beautiful, powerful instrument than the voice.”