sally von rosen & johannes seluga

l’ennui

co-curated by sigrid hermann

september 19 - november 08, 2025

There is a particular stillness that makes itself felt when saturation silences perception. L’ennui, a French word often said to defy exact translation, names this state of existential overexposure: when the world is not lacking, but excessively present, and meaning is neither linear nor literal, but layered and elusive.

This condition forms the foundation of the exhibition, bringing together Berlin-based artists Johannes Seluga and Sally von Rosen. As Baudelaire once described, l’ennui is not emptiness but a fullness so total that it presses the world into silence, a persistent ache beneath beauty’s surface sheen. An oversaturation of a world that offers too much, too constantly emerges as a quiet undercurrent throughout the exhibition. In response, both artists pare things back, returning to the essence of form, material, and color.

In Seluga’s paintings, interior states press outward into distinct material form. His process, intuitive, and layered, unfolds like a slow excavation of psychological terrain. His use of the Zorn palette functions less as a system than as a means of attunement: earthy tones and flickers of pale light carry mood like weather. His works do not depict moments they reside in them, as if time had thickened into surface. Figures appear and dissolve within the dense weave of texture and brushwork, as if memory itself was trying to take shape but never fully solidifies. Landscapes become thresholds of intimate, disoriented zones where the human form is neither fully distinct nor fully absent. This ambiguity reflects a deeper interest in the spaces between perception and disappearance, self and environment, memory and presence. Seluga’s paintings often feel as though they are on the verge of being remembered, suspended in the act of becoming visible.

Von Rosen’s sculpture holds a tension that is both poised and precarious. It suggests rather than concludes: limbs caught mid-motion, curves that carry tension forward. Thorns unsettle its sinuous shape, introducing tension without breaking the form. 2. Rind (Motherform) evokes the trace of a lived, animated body without fully assuming it, drawing the viewer into a somatic relation with what is shifting, fragmented, and unresolved. Though it asserts an insistent presence it remains open to projection and psychological charge. Her sculptural vocabulary unfolds through texture and gesture, speaking to longing, absence, and transference. Von Rosen, who is informed by post-minimalist, surrealist, and feminist traditions, approaches sculpture as a site of affective encounter, where sensation precedes interpretation and contradiction becomes generative. Her work seems to emerge from somewhere between epochs, recalling primal experiences of birth, death, separation, and transformation. As with memory or myth, it does not resolve; it lingers, mutates, and returns. In this way, the body in movement becomes a vessel for affect, transition, and the cyclical forces that it carries.

The sensibilities at play in both Seluga’s and von Rosen’s work echos Louise Bourgeois’ understanding of art not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a form of emotional communication, a language of the unconscious. For Bourgeois, perception was not about deciphering a coded message, but about being receptive to feeling to what a material, a shape, or a gesture. In this way, the works in L’ennui resist resolution; they ask not to be read, but to be encountered. Both Seluga and von Rosen approach their work not as vehicles for theory, but as extensions of inner states, emotional memory, and embodied thought. Their works do not seek to explain, convince, or conclude, they invite the viewer into a shared space of intuition and vulnerability, where meaning emerges not through clarity, but through presence, texture, rhythm, and relation.

sigrid hermann, august 2025

Johannes Seluga (b.1998 in Worms, Germany) lives and works in Berlin.
His painting emerges from a process-oriented practice shaped by instinct, intuition, reduction, and

continuous transformation. Often created without a predetermined narrative, the works evolve through a dialogue with material and surface until fields, figurations, and in-between spaces begin to reveal themselves. Seluga understands color as an autonomous substance a carrier of qualities beyond representation. His paintings play with perception and perspective, opening up new spatial experiences and giving rise to worlds that oscillate between abstraction and suggestion. In their formal openness, they negotiate the tension between visibility and concealment, the individual and the collective, time and space—while continually circling the ever-present questions of existence and origin.

Sally von Rosen (b. 1994, Gothenburg, Sweden) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working primarily with sculpture and performance. Her practice explores political ecology and emotional transference, inviting viewers to feel before thinking. Her hybrid sculptural forms balance liveliness and morbidity, while performances conceptually extend these works. Inspired by Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, she investigates the vitality of materials and their affective power. Her works often evoke the fantastical and futuristic, prompting reflection on the human condition.

Von Rosen is represented by Andréhn-Schiptjenko (Stockholm/Paris) and has exhibited at institutions such as Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (Germany), Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm), and Kunstmuseum Den Haag (The Hague).