The Space In Between

Solo Exhibition, MARUANI MERCIER, Brussels | 4 September 2025 - 18 October 2025

Von Wolfe
The Space In Between
MARUANI MERCIER Gallery, Brussels
4 September - 18 October 2025

Portraying figures in restrained interiors or expansive landscapes, the works in

The Space In Between evade attribution to a fixed space and time. The works

are developed in collaboration with artificial intelligence, but not as mere tools

of image generation. Instead, Von Wolfe treats the AI as an errant interlocutor

- producing a flood of visual propositions, outliers, and uncanny hybrids. From

this visual delirium, the artist isolates moments of particular psychic intensity,

reworking them by hand in oil with classical precision. What results is a new

kind of mythic realism - one that emerges from the machine’s subconscious

and the artist’s instinctual logic.

Compositional elements surrounding the figures, such as toy trains, houses

or pearls stand out for their specificity and alluring strangeness, yet remain

paradoxically resistant to interpretation. Alluding to a narrative through

meticulously detailed forms, each painting hovers over the boundary between

the realist and the magical, conjuring the space of profound psychological

tension. As the artist notes, “I’m interested in The Space In Between things. It

doesn’t matter which era the objects in the paintings come from, they could

be a contemporary jet or a bird cage. What is important to me is that they are

not symbols and this frame of reference that they give shouldn’t be too fixed,

they don’t have a fixed meaning.”

Responding to one another through a harmonised palette, the paintings in

The Space In Between construct the vision of a world that subtly deviates from

the Newtonian sense of physical space. In Golden Blaze, the figure casts a

shadow that appears distanced, as if animated by a distinct presence. She

is leaning precariously above a miniature house on fire, its flames abstracted

into an almost improbable stillness. By intermingling passages of luminous

precision with discreet distortions of the laws of physics, Von Wolfe transforms

the composition into a psychological realm, a space of personal interiority and

reflection.

In Secret Journey, the protagonist turns elegantly to meet our gaze, her

presence and power underscored by the low horizon line evocative of classical

portraiture. Her expression of surprise or address, lit at a sharp angle against

the velvet dark texture of the empty room, alludes to the sense of psychic

tension. The toy train on a chain, seemingly advancing along an incomplete

track, emits smoke – a scene of an enigmatic push and pull, frozen in a poignant

compositional equilibrium.

Operating in the space between intuitive human discernment and a cuttingedge

technology, between creating and finding an image amid the echoes of human

knowledge, the artist considers each medium in its own right, distinct, yet

harmoniously interconnected. As Von Wolfe explains, “I see the two media as

not hierarchical – for me, they’re more like a voice and an echo, or a body and

a shadow. I wouldn’t place somehow the shadow in a lesser place because it

doesn’t have the physicality of the body, nor the echo in some way as the less

beautiful, powerful instrument than the voice.”

Full exhibition details can be viewed and downloaded via the "Download Document" button below.   
September 4, 2025