For Rivers We Cannot See, Silke Weißbach brings together a series of abstract, colour field paintings produced over the last two years. The works unfold through sustained engagement with painting as a material, bodily, and sensory system. Her practice is shaped by a continued movement away from the studio and into direct encounters with watery environments. Over recent years, she has spent extended periods near coastlines and tidal terrains—by the Baltic Sea of her childhood, and later along the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. These journeys began as acts of departure, yet gradually revealed themselves as a form of return. What emerged was a coming home to modes of sensing and understanding formed early, before painting became a discipline and the studio a fixed site of production.
Travel operates here as a condition of thought. Immersion in humidity, salt air, shifting light, and vegetation reactivates bodily memories that precede language. Walking through pine forests with resin warming in the sun; moving through mangroves and palms dense with moisture; sensing how different environments hold water and how the body adjusts almost instinctively. These encounters do not generate images. They produce material knowledge that later enters the work.
Weißbach does not abandon the studio but reconfigures its function. It becomes a permeable threshold rather than a sealed interior. What is gathered outside—matter, scent, rhythm, sensation—returns and continues to transform within it. Materials closely connected to the body and practices of care form the basis of the paintings: collagen, hyaluronic acid, wax, aloe vera, spirulina, cochineal, soap, and plant residues. Some are collected during time spent in natural environments; others originate from cosmetic and medicinal cultures shaped by a desire for softness, preservation, and longevity. These substances remain active. They bind, absorb, seep, and settle, allowing time to register physically within the surface.
Water functions as a structuring force throughout the work. It shapes landscapes and circulates through bodies, linking interior and exterior systems. Blood plasma carries a salinity close to that of the primordial sea, situating the human body within oceanic history. Within the paintings, these relations appear through viscosity, opacity, staining, and sedimentation. Layers accumulate slowly, forming topologies that hold moisture differently and retain traces of pressure, touch, and duration.
The works are abstract. They do not depict places or translate external views into painterly language. They present conditions. Like weather systems or tides, they articulate states of density, flow, and resistance. Scale plays a central role in how the paintings are encountered. Large-format works unfold as atmospheric fields that orient the body in space, while smaller paintings invite proximity and sustained attention. Together, they establish a rhythm between immersion and intimacy. Within the gallery space, the journeys that initiated the work become present through surface, scent, and spatial resonance. Terrain registers across the canvases as layered accretions, allowing the paintings to operate as fields rather than scenes. The exhibition follows a rhythm of colour. Pink hues, deep purples, and dark reds move against green fields, registering shifts between interior states and external landscapes. What began outside remains alive within the gallery—no longer as landscape, but as matter in transformation—continuing to unfold through time and presence.
Silke Weißbach (1984) is a German artist living and working in London. She studied Illustration and Graphic Design at the University of Applied Arts and Sculpture at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, before completing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2020). Her practice spans painting and interdisciplinary research, engaging with material processes, ecological systems, and embodied perception.
In recent years, she has participated in residencies at Xenia, North Hampshire, and Porthmeor Studios, Cornwall (2024), and completed the Imagination Fellowship at Arizona State University (2025). Her Correspondence (Sugar) series, initiated in 2020, entered the Jan van Eyck Future Materials Bank in 2022. She was shortlisted for the London Bronze Sculpture Fellowship (2023) and the Cob Award (2024) for an interdisciplinary project exploring collective intelligence, bioacoustics, and ecological consciousness. In 2025, she received the Windsor & Newton and Paul Smith International Art Prize.
Past exhibitions include Landscapes of Time and Memory, Fred Levine Gallery, Bruton (2025); Ember, Spinnerei Leipzig, Informality Gallery (2024); Kooperation, Nizza Gallery, Berlin (2024); Taking the Light out of the Prism, Duplex Gallery, Lisbon Art Weekend (2023); Pass Your Tongue Over, Kanister, Hamburg (2023); BYOB, Bomb Factory, London (2022); Homegrown, Hauser & Wirth London (2020); and 50/50, Fold Gallery, London (2020).
