In Baltes’ works, playful images come from an extensive process of looking and thinking, pondering and turning over, images flipped around, turned inside out and upside down over and over again. The apparent easiness of her works is a performance of the painting, a black box of innumerable layers and perfected techniques. This effortful irony works to illustrate the act of seeing itself – a process rarely as straightforward as it feels. The eye scans, the mind fills in what is missing, and memory and expectation shape what we take to be in front of us. Baltes’ paintings make a play on this process, interrupting its easy flow. Remembered fragments of her surroundings are pared back and enlarged until they tip between the recognisable and the abstract, the particular and the metaphorical. Reducing an image to its essentials sharpens our attention rather than diminishing it.

Baltes’ work, charged with a carbonated energy, invites a playful reassessment of the everyday, where the incidental can take centre stage.

To read more about this exhibition, click here.