Public Gallery is happy to current Sill, a solo exhibition of latest portray and sculpture by Berlin-based artist Cathrin Hoffmann, whose topics embody the bodily depth and psychological fatigue engendered by an age of knowledge overload. Not performing exaggerated gestures of need or grotesque theatricality, Hoffmann’s figures inhabit states of sustained rigidity and accumulating strain, sedimented within the threshold between endurance and motion.
Hoffmann’s observe has lengthy been involved with states somewhat than topics – her figures usually maintain durational poses, their confinement dictated by the boundaries of the canvas. In a marked formal shift, current works flip towards the monochromatic: reddish-brown tones, from darkish ochre to rust and clay, dominate the palette. Sill, the exhibition’s title, frames this shift and operates as each metaphor and web site. Architecturally, a sill suggests a ledge – a spot of pause and relaxation, but in addition of voyeuristic consumption. Geologically, it refers to a sheet of magma that intrudes into present rock, cooling and solidifying in place. Evoking sedimentary layers and the earth’s core, the work’ sandy, coarse surfaces arrest the shifting eye and resist the velocity of digital consumption, embedding resistance inside the stillness of Hoffmann’s figures and demonstrating an evolving concern for radical passivity.
The exhibition is additional grounded within the idea of acedia, an historical time period describing existential weariness the place presence persists however is destabilized. It denotes a situation of wakefulness by means of endurance, a suspended potential the place motion stays conceivable but can’t unfold. The concrete sculpture Reaching the Backside and Calling It Peak (2026) offers type to this situation, its twisted limbs, inverted torso, and curled toes compressing motion into stasis. In Don’t Neglect My Form (2026), the determine’s crossed legs and hunched again register this pressure with explicit depth.
In The Glow That Retains Us Awake (2026), an outstretched torso is diminished to a suspended current, succesful solely of the slightest extension of a single finger. Horizontality is emphasised not merely as a proper concern, however one which grounds the physique in panorama. Hoffmann renders seen the paradox of our psychological situation: a heightened consciousness set in opposition to more and more diminished company. Right here, radical passivity takes on a brand new dimension, as a counter place to the demand of fixed exercise that governs our current second.
