ARDEN + WHITE GALLERY is pleased to present Rooms, the debut U.S. solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Kim Bartelt, on view from April 23 through June 1, 2025. Rooms features a new body of work that explores the quiet complexities of space, structure, and materiality through Bartelt’s distinct practice of layering paper on linen.
Bartelt’s attunement to spatial relationships and structural harmony is rooted in a lifelong exposure to architecture. Though not formally trained in the discipline, her father’s work as an architect and the environments of her upbringing cultivated a keen sensitivity to form, proportion, and design. These architectural influences are quietly embedded in her compositions, where abstracted elements—windows, thresholds, and partitions—become meditative explorations of presence and absence.
Working with delicate, semi-translucent papers affixed to linen supports, Bartelt constructs her works through a process of intuitive arrangement and quiet precision. The resulting surfaces hold a stillness that is at once minimalist and deeply personal, evoking the fragility of memory and the passage of time. Her muted palette—comprised of faded whites, gentle greys, and soft earth tones—further enhances this atmospheric quality, allowing light to interact with the work in shifting ways.
The exhibition’s title, Rooms, speaks to both the architectural and emotional dimensions of space. Each work becomes a kind of room unto itself—an interiorized space shaped by subtle variations in texture, depth, and transparency. These works do not depict rooms in a literal sense, but rather suggest the feeling of moving through or dwelling within carefully defined environments, physical or psychological.
Set in New Canaan, a town renowned for its modernist architectural heritage—including the Philip Johnson Glass House and the legacy of the Harvard Five—Rooms finds a uniquely resonant context. Bartelt’s pared-down abstractions speak to this history while offering a renewed perspective on space and form through the language of material.
Bartelt’s first solo exhibition in the United States brings her quietly powerful work into a new conversation, expanding her ongoing exploration of material and memory, while opening a dialogue on how we build, inhabit, and internalize the spaces around us.
© Text and Photo Courtesy of ARDEN + WHITE Gallery
