Wolfgang Flad | Tanja Selzer – LIAISONS

The title “LIAISONS” refers not only to the encounter between two artistic positions, but to a multitude of connections: between painting and sculpture, surface and body, colour and material, growth and structure, the visible and the imagined. Rather than reducing these relationships to a single statement, the exhibition allows them to emerge alongside one another, to touch, diverge and form new connections.

Wolfgang Flad’s sculptures appear as organic structures that expand into space and change their form with shifting viewpoints, light and movement. They evoke plants, corals, roots, bones or cellular structures without depicting any of them directly. Flad does not create representations of nature. Instead, his works follow principles that also underlie natural processes of growth: branching, repetition, expansion, condensation and the fragile balance between stability and movement.

The open structures of his sculptures do not simply occupy the space around them. They articulate it, enclose empty spaces and at the same time open it up to new lines of sight. Mass and void become equally important elements of the work. The gaze can wander through the forms; the sculpture changes with every step taken by the viewer. Rather than appearing as a self-contained object, it becomes a spatial structure whose full effect only unfolds through movement.

Tanja Selzer’s painting originates in the close observation of plants, landscapes and natural phenomena. Her paintings, however, are not botanical descriptions. In the process of painting, the motifs gradually detach themselves from their concrete appearance. Contours lose their definition, forms overlap, and colour and light develop a dynamic of their own. The result is a series of complex pictorial spaces that move between figuration and dissolution.

In Selzer’s work, plants do not appear as isolated objects, but as part of living structures. Blossoms, leaves and branches emerge only to recede from view again. Close-up and distance, precision and blurring, observation and memory intertwine. Rather than opening up spaces that can be read unequivocally, her paintings create atmospheric states in which the visible is constantly shifting.

The particular tension of the exhibition arises from the different artistic means employed by the two artists. Painting and sculpture do not illustrate one another, but offer different perspectives on related processes. While Tanja Selzer’s paintings create organic pictorial spaces through colour, light and painterly depth, Wolfgang Flad’s sculptures enter physical space directly through material, volume and void. In the dialogue between these different forms of expression, connections become visible that extend beyond formal similarities.

This juxtaposition does not produce a unified image of nature. Instead, nature emerges as a dynamic structure shaped by change, interdependence and continual transformation. Forms grow, branch out, overlap, dissolve and emerge anew. In both artistic positions, form therefore appears not as a final state, but as a moment within an open-ended process.

This also reveals another meaning of the exhibition’s title. LIAISONS refers not only to visible connections, but also to relationships that only emerge through the act of looking. A transition of colour may echo a sculptural form; an opening within a sculpture may alter the way a painting is perceived; a previously overlooked structure may suddenly become apparent through the presence of a neighbouring work. The exhibition does not prescribe these relationships. Instead, it allows viewers the freedom to discover correspondences of their own.

This openness is central to the exhibition. The works do not prescribe a single interpretation or lead to a definitive statement about nature. Rather, they invite us to experience perception as an active process. What we see depends not only on the individual work, but also on our own movement, the time we spend looking, our memories and personal associations.

Nature is presented neither as a romantic counter-image to civilisation nor as the illustration of an ecological thesis. Instead, it appears as a network of relationships of which humankind is itself a part. The exhibition thus also raises the question of how we position ourselves in relation to our environment: as observers looking at something supposedly separate from ourselves, or as part of a complex system that we affect and on which we simultaneously depend.

LIAISONS unfolds in the spaces in between: between the works, between perception and memory, between material presence and imagination. The exhibition creates a situation in which connections become visible while differences remain tangible. The connections that emerge are ultimately determined through the encounter with the works and through each viewer’s individual way of seeing.