Into the Surface, by Defne Tesal and Stephan Baumkötter at Bartha_contemporary

Six works from the "Door" series (2025), by Defne Tesal, dialogue with five small-format paintings by Stephan Baumkötter, from 2019, in this duo exhibition at Bartha_contemporary. Despite different materials and methods, both bodies of work construct a subtle sense of depth from repeated gestures, layered surfaces, and a tactile handling of color. Tesal reduces the familiar image of a door to two rectangles of color, one inside the other: in "Door 1–6" (2025), fields of acrylic are crossed by close vertical lines, drawn with a ballpoint pen directly on the fabric, and the inner rectangle suggests openness and depth, even though the repeated marks pull the gaze back to the physical surface and the texture of the material. Doors and windows are recurrent in the Turkish artist's work as transitional spaces — threshold states in which, according to her, the old and the new mix, and transformation, although painful, becomes liberating. Baumkötter's five canvases, "Untitled (2019-09)" to "Untitled (2019-13)", are born from the repeated application of oil stick, one line after another, until the drawing condenses into a painted surface — the artist describes his paintings as stacked and condensed drawings, in which time accumulates layer by layer. In both cases, depth emerges from matter, touch, and repetition, not from illusion: the surface becomes a space in itself, open to continuous viewing.