INTO THE SURFACE

Bartha Contemporary is pleased to present Into the Surface, a two-person exhibition bringing together recent works by Defne Tesal and Stephan Baumkötter. Six works from Tesal’s Door series, made in 2025, are shown alongside five small-format paintings by Baumkötter from 2019. Distinct in material and method, both bodies of work create a subtle sense of depth through repeated gestures, layered surfaces and a tactile handling of colour.

Tesal reduces the familiar image of a door to two colour rectangles, one set within the other. In Door 1–6 (2025), acrylic fields are crossed by closely spaced vertical lines drawn in ballpoint pen directly onto fabric. While the inner rectangle suggests an opening or depth, the repeated marks continually draw the eye back to the physical surface and the weave of the material. Soft, unsettled edges allow the works to hover between image and object, surface and space.

Doors and windows recur in Tesal’s practice as places of transition. She has described these threshold states as moments in which “the old and the new intermingle, and transformation – though painful – becomes liberating”. Repetition remains central to her work, registering duration, movement and the relationship between body and material. The Door works were completed in the year preceding her residency at Delfina Foundation in London, where she participated in the inaugural season of Making and Materiality earlier this year.

Baumkötter’s five works, Untitled (2019-09) through Untitled (2019-13), are made through the repeated application of oil paint-stick. One line is placed over another until drawing condenses into a painted surface. Colour is not predetermined, but emerges through the gradual accumulation of material.

Baumkötter has described his paintings as “condensed, stacked drawings” in which “time accumulates”. Their modest scale recalls works from his 1993 residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. Repetition produces subtle shifts in density, surface and colour, while the layered paint creates a soft, almost haptic presence.

In both artists’ work, depth emerges through material, touch and repetition rather than illusion. The surface becomes a space in itself: layered, tactile and open to continued looking.