BRUSSELS.- Maruani Mercier will present The Space In Between, an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Von Wolfe, opening on 4 September at the Brussels Gallery.
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.”
Operating in the space between intuitive human discernment and a cutting-edge 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.”
Von Wolfe (b. 1966, London) is a British artist whose work explores themes of identity, intimacy, psychological depth, and power dynamics. His art reflects on how invisible societal, technological, and psychological forces shape and influence personal agency. Blending traditional oil painting with advanced diffusion-based technology, Von Wolfe strikes a balance between intuitive human insight and digital innovation. He transforms curated digital compositions into richly rendered oil paintings, creating an ongoing dialogue between the digital and the physical. In November, he will present a major retrospective at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan.
