BERLIN
Una Szeemann
Transcendental Seduction
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Until: 21.6.2025
Exhibition view
Just as light attracts insects, a distant glow has a seductive effect. The closer you get to it, the more visible it becomes – or it dazzles so much that it fades back into invisibility. Such a hypnotic attraction emanates from Una Szeemann‘s neon work Transcendental Seduction: an angelic figure of circle, arrow and diamond, composed in perfect symmetry, shining from its center. It unfolds a mysterious quality reminiscent of symbols such as infinity, fire or fertility. But these images also disappear in the light, spiritual knowledge and personal projections evaporate. What appears to manifest, eludes at the moment of comprehension, dissolving into the invisibility of waves and particles.
The Siren Spines series continues this symbolic quality: deep black leather skins on shiny metallic structures appear archaic in their material tension between soft skin and hard skeleton, like body fragments or mythical hybrid creatures. They resonate with hidden feminine forces between seduction and defense. The title refers to sirens – their song and knowledge a lure, intangible and dangerous. The heliogravures in the series Virare al tatto („To veer through touch“) also reveal the incomprehensible. Hand movements on a glass plate covered with sand create flowing pictorial spaces of light and shadow – traces somewhere between earth, water and sky.
Exhibition view
With the sculptural work Andare in sogno (“Walking in the dream”), Una Szeemann addresses the apparent separation of body and mind during dreaming, giving form to the moment of transition: with leather hanging from the ceiling, disembodied shells are created that evoke presence and absence at the same time.
In E sono cento (“so I am one hundred”), theatricality is used as a framework to stage a relationship that transcends time and space. Three blonde horsehair tails face each other, like a flight from earth to heaven, the work symbolizes the indissoluble bond between body and mind and its material barriers.
Szeemann‘s works explore the boundary between the visible and the unconscious. Her practice is exploratory, poetic and physical – an engagement with that which eludes language and yet takes shape in symbols, traces and materials, yet always points beyond the material to touch the immaterial.
The artist lives and works in Zurich and Tegna and this is her first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Transcendental Seduction
Fluorescent tubes · 180 x 117cm, ø12 cm · 2024
Galerie Berlin
Schweidnitzer Str 17
10709 Berlin
Opening hours:
Wed – Sat: 12 – 6 pm