Traces Remain Alistair Gow, Birgit Klerch, Esther Schnerr
TRACES REMAINS
EXHIBITION
04.07. - 09.08.2025
OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY 4 JULY
18:00 - 21:00
ARTIST TALKS
SATURDAY 05 JULY
12:00
SATURDAY 09 AUGUST
14:00 (ONLINE)
FINISSAGE
SATURDAY 09 AUGUST
14:00 - 18:00
OPENING HOURS
TUESDAY - SATURDAY
12:00 - 18:00
LOCATION
BBA GALLERY
KÖPENICKER STR. 96
10179 BERLIN
What do we leave behind — in landscapes, in memory, in matter?
In Traces Remain, the works of Alistair Gow, Birgit Klerch, and Esther Schnerr
meet across quiet distances. Each artist, in their own way, maps the spaces
where presence fades and memory settles — where human impact becomes
echo, and the line between nature and narrative begins to blur. Together, their
practices speak not through declaration, but through the careful accumulation of
detail, surface, and mood. These are not loud works, but enduring ones. Each
image holds something back — a trace, a mark, a subtle erosion of what once
was.
Alistair Gow’s print-based works carry the delicate translucency of watercolour,
yet emerge through slow, hands-on processes. Monotypes and layered
impressions offer fragments of figures, interiors, and fleeting gestures, rendered
with just enough clarity to pull us in — and just enough ambiguity to keep us
suspended. His images feel ungraspable, like memories returning in half-light: a
room you once entered, a figure you almost recognised. There’s a quiet intimacy
in these prints, shaped not just by what is shown, but by the spaces between
things — the silence around the trace.
Birgit Klerch works in a language of dissolution. Her paintings — grounded in her
years between Basel, Stockholm, and Hamburg — unfold from personal
topographies, drawing on lived rooms, emotional weather, and the blurred
boundaries of recollection. Surfaces are scraped, layered, washed out. Details
appear only to disappear again. A curtain, a wall, a field at dusk — all rendered
with equal care and instability. In her recent works, Klerch turns toward the
classical motif of landscape, yet what she finds there is no longer untouched. The
horizon becomes a place of tension, where beauty strains under the weight of
presence, and every view carries the mark of human alteration. Her paintings do not offer answers. They hold space for reflection, for stillness, for the slow
unraveling of the idyllic.
Esther Schnerr brings a different kind of depth — one that stretches across
geological time. Her work, grounded in drawing, watercolour, and textile, is
meticulous, layered, and filled with quiet wonder. Trained in classical painting and
shaped by an early career in finance, Schnerr’s practice carries both precision
and introspection. Fossils, imagined marine life, extinct forms, and cellular
structures emerge from her compositions with delicate intensity. In series such as
Human Remains and Cambrian Sea, the human is both actor and witness — the
cause and the afterthought. Her works are less about catastrophe than about
continuity: what we touch, what we change, and what remains after us. Even the
materials she uses — the softness of thread, the vulnerability of paper —
reinforce her themes: that all things are part of a fragile, interwoven ecology.
What connects these three practices is not style or subject, but a shared
attention to the act of seeing — and the quiet weight of what is left behind. Their
works ask us to look again, more slowly. To notice the way a form dissolves into
pigment. To follow the outline of a creature whose name we may not know. To sit
in the stillness of a painted room that feels somehow familiar.
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