THREADS OF GOLD PRESS MATERIALS

Gold is everywhere again — and more expensive than ever.

While Maurizio Cattelan makes headlines with his golden toilet and gold prices climb to new heights, a question simultaneously grows: What lies behind the sheen? Who pays the price?

The exhibition "Threads of Gold" brings together twelve international artists who are rethinking the symbol of gold — as a sign of power, spirituality, greed, illusion, and hope. They interweave personal, political, and material perspectives, posing the question of what truly holds value today.

Gold fascinates, seduces, and contradicts. It is humanity's oldest promise—and simultaneously one of the most fragile. In a time when everything is fluctuating, its shimmer remains seductively stable — and for precisely that reason, it is a mirror of our society.

"Threads of Gold" invites you to discover this ambivalence — between seduction, beauty and responsibility, luxury and loss, materiality and myth.

Curated by Renata Kudlacek / BBA Gallery

Verena Bachl (Berlin / Bavaria, Germany) transforms the "overlooked" into treasures in her work: 500 collected insects, covered in gold, become monuments to the fragile diversity of life. The precious metal gives a voice to the smallest creatures — a silent warning about the progressive extinction of species.

Anikó Boda (Budapest, Hungary), on the other hand, uses gold leaf in her paintings as an alchemy of creation. The gold represents the spiritual and emotional transformation that turns simple materials into art — a symbol of the creative act itself, which elevates the mundane to the sublime.

For Tim Bengel (Southern Germany), gold becomes a carrier of cultural significance. With his characteristic sand and gold leaf technique, he reflects on consumption, status, and the spirit of the age. His works link transience and permanence by confronting the glamour of luxury with the fragility of the moment.

Giulietta Coates (England / France) uses gold to elevate landscapes and moments in nature to the level of the sacred. Her photographs are meditations on longing and loss — gold lends a holy aura to the transient, like a final shimmer over nature's disappearing icons.

Jahna Dahms (Leipzig, Germany) transforms everyday industrial forms into gilded artifacts in her series RELICS. By applying 24-karat gold leaf, she elevates discarded packaging to objects of veneration and reflection. Gold becomes a cultural constant — a timeless symbol of value, memory, and permanence that shifts the transience of the material into a new, almost sacred dimension.

For Jens Juul (Copenhagen, Denmark), gold becomes a metaphor for the inner struggle. In his series Little Fighters, the gold medal that young gymnasts strive for stands for dedication, perseverance, and community. The metal symbolises not merely triumph, but the preciousness of human endeavour.

Renata Kudlacek (Germany / Czech Republic) combines gold with memory, identity, and transformation in her collages. The metal functions as a luminous thread between past and present, between her birthplace of Prague and Berlin — a homage to the "Golden City" and simultaneously a meditation on home, remembrance, and renewal.

Katarina Kudelova (Slovakia / France) uses gold as both a healing and a dominating element. In her works, it functions as symbolic Kintsugi, gilding the wounds of animals — a sign of care and a warning at the same time. In other works, gold becomes the embodiment of absolute power and divine dominance — an ambivalent symbol between compassion and violence.

In the work of Luca Ortis (Great Britain / London), gold joins two photographic prints into a new unit — inspired by the Japanese Kintsugi tradition. The golden lines heal without concealing, revealing beauty in imperfection. Thus, gold becomes a bridge between memory and imagination, between the material and the spiritual.

Kostas Papakostas (Greece / Great Britain) understands gold as flowing light, not a sign of wealth. For him, it is a means of making movement and change visible — a color of transition between the visible and the invisible. Its brilliance reflects the transience that forms the core of his painting.

Finally, Nicolas Vionnet (Switzerland) uses the material as a mirror of contemporary contradictions. In his installations, gold subverts its own symbolism: a gold-colored emergency blanket replaces the glamour of wealth with the fragility of life; a dripping golden tap transforms the sacred into bitter realism. Vionnet plays with the cultural history of gold to bring power, irony, and humanity into a sensitive balance.

Threads of Gold unites these diverse artistic voices in a complex reflection on value, transience, and beauty. Gold here becomes a language, a gesture, a resistance, and a revelation — a shimmering thread that reweaves the questions of what we consider valuable.

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