PARIS.- Andréhn-Schiptjenko announced The Sun Stumbles In, German painter Cornelia Baltes’ first solo exhibition in Paris. The opening will take place on Saturday 18 October 2025 from 4–8pm in the presence of the artist and the exhibition will run through Saturday 22 November 2025.

Cornelia Baltes’ work stands at the intersection of memory, observation, and abstraction — a zone of productive ambiguity where the visual language of painting becomes both playful and profound. In The Sun Stumbles In, Baltes transforms the gallery into an immersive chromatic landscape. Her compositions — built from airbrushed gradients, bold gestural marks, and meticulous brushwork — inhabit the delicate threshold between control and spontaneity, figuration and abstraction, the intimate and the universal.

Baltes’ paintings are grounded not in direct observation but in the filtering process of memory. She often begins with sketches derived from remembered experiences rather than direct sight, allowing her images to absorb incidental details from her surroundings. This process gives her work a porousness — her paintings act, as she puts it, like sponges, absorbing traces of the everyday and distilling them into vibrant, ambiguous forms. In many works, details are magnified and examined as though through a forensic lens; what first appears effortless and fluid is, on closer inspection, the product of prolonged reworking and refinement. Beneath the smooth, seemingly industrial surfaces lies an invisible history of labor and revision.

Technically, Baltes’ use of airbrush gives her canvases a velvety, fabric-like finish, a rich smoothness that blurs the boundary between painting and object. The effect recalls post-war abstraction — particularly the chromatic expanses of Colour Field painting and the gestural lyricism of Abstract Expressionism — yet Baltes subverts these traditions through an infusion of humour and humanity. Her surfaces may appear machine-perfect, but the carefully placed “imperfections,” the minute details or apparent glitches, serve as the artist’s wink to the viewer — a subtle reminder that these images are not industrial artefacts, but traces of touch and intention.

This dialogue between surface control and gestural spontaneity places Baltes within a broader lineage of contemporary painters revisiting abstraction’s legacy while reasserting the role of figuration. Her forms flirt with recognisability, a curve might hint at a palm tree or a bird, a shape might evoke a limb, a smile, or a fragment of anatomy, without ever settling into clear depiction. The viewer’s mind oscillates between the known and the uncertain, completing the image through their own associative processes. This openness to interpretation, and her acknowledgment of the viewer’s role in activating the work, situates Baltes’ practice in a dynamic exchange between artist, artwork, and audience.

In The Sun Stumbles In, Baltes has expanded her practice by working with a constellation of smaller- format pieces developed simultaneously. This serial process, akin to a sketchbook unfolding across a wall, transformed her studio into a laboratory of visual play. Each painting, though self-contained, interacts with others as part of a larger organism — a network of gestures and rhythms that extends beyond the canvas. The installation itself becomes a choreography: paintings are positioned in clusters and intervals, large works punctuating the space like pauses in a melody, while wall murals dissolve the boundary between artwork and environment. The result is a spatial experience that envelops the viewer, echoing the performative staging of a play in which each work becomes a “character” with its own personality and presence.

The tension between simplicity and depth, between comic exuberance and painterly precision, animates Baltes’ entire œuvre. Her visual language, with its bright pigments, flattened forms, and playful compositional rhythms, radiates immediacy and joy. Beneath that lightness lies nonetheless a complex structure of oppositions: control versus accident, figuration versus abstraction, surface versus depth. By engaging humour as a serious artistic strategy, Baltes challenges the weight of modernist painting’s history, reworking its visual codes with wit and irreverence.

In her paintings, the act of seeing becomes both subject and method. The viewer’s recognition is always partial, their memory always active. Baltes asks: how do we see, and what do we remember? In this sense, her art speaks not only to the history of painting but to the psychology of perception itself. The Sun Stumbles In is thus more than a visual exhibition — it is an inquiry into the ways colour, form, and memory coalesce into meaning. Through a dance of gesture and surface, Cornelia Baltes continues to expand the language of painting, proving that beneath its apparent simplicity lies an inexhaustible complexity — radiant, mischievous, and deeply human.