Galleri Nicolai Wallner is pleased to present Tit for Tat, Cornelia Baltes’ second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Cornelia Baltes is known for her captivating paintings and installations which stand on a line between abstraction and figuration. Bold colour fields are juxtaposed with gestural brushstrokes and more pictorial elements, fizzing with a dynamic energy and narrative(s) that are hinted at but never properly explained.

This exhibition marks a development in Baltes’ practice, embellishing and enriching her visual lexicon and drawing us deeper into another world. Baltes’ formally astute paintings explore the medium itself. Painted canvases on murals, playful diptychs, and a combination of classical hangings with more lively, absurd and unexpected placements results in an exhibition which keeps the viewer on their toes.

Each of Baltes brushstrokes feels deliberate, singular and inevitable while at the same time remaining wholly open to our interpretation. Her imagery has the power to play with our memories, acting as a cipher which we project our own subjective experiences onto, morphing for each of us into a different narrative, into something personal and maybe intimate.

The short name-like letter combinations which form Baltes’ titles lend the feeling of characters in a play, suggesting that the exhibition space is as a kind of scenography which we have also entered, becoming enmeshed within Baltes’ story.

Cornelia Baltes (b. 1978, Germany) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2011. She has exhibited in group shows at Kunsthalle Nuremburg (Nuremburg), MOSTYN (Wales), Museum Folkwang (Essen), Museum Kunst Palast Dusseldorf (Dusseldorf) among many others. In 2019 and 2020, she was part of the extensive “Jeztz! Now! Young Painting in Germany” exhibition which spanned Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.