Between Reality and Imagination with Franz Stein and Rosalie Werthefrongel - Courtesy of König Galerie
Franz and Rosalie met at the Art Academy in Munich, the way artists who end up working side by side for years usually do: by accident, in a hallway, maybe in front of someone else's work that neither of them knew yet whether they loved or hated. Then Berlin, then a shared studio. We walked in not knowing much of anything, and walked out with a lot more than we expected. The first room you hit walking in is Franz's, and it does something disorienting before you've even looked at a single painting properly. The whole space is white. Not gallery white, studio white, the kind of white that has been lived in. The floor is covered in paper to protect it while he works, and that paper is stained with the same drips and gestures that end up on his canvases. Stand in the doorway and for a second you genuinely cannot tell where the wall stops and the floor begins. The studio is not a container for the work. It is the work, spilling outward, still wet in spirit if not in fact. We stood in that room with the floor doing the same thing as the walls, and it made sense that the first thing anyone said was about a wall outside the studio, not inside it.
Lea Kramhöller went there first, thinking back to something the artist had said earlier about Berlin. She saw concrete, graffiti layered over older graffiti, maybe painted over more than once, and wondered if that was somewhere in Stein's memory even without him naming it directly. From a Berlin wall the conversation moved, almost immediately, to something bigger.
Annie Moreau read the paintings as a map of someone's life. Layers on layers on layers, seasons of color, chapters in conversation with each other, nothing meant to be taken in at once. You look, you move, you notice a small shape you missed the first time, and the noticing itself becomes part of the pleasure. She kept coming back to how one color changes depending on what's next to it, the yellow reads differently against the blue than it would alone, which is just how color behaves and also, maybe, how a life behaves. A map of ourselves, she said, if we could ever take a screenshot of one.
Mareike Wulf took the map somewhere more literal and stranger: the brain. She thought of neuroimaging slices, synapses lighting up in different regions across different scans, and saw the two canvases in the room as two brains, or maybe one brain talking to itself, or maybe a third mind entirely, the artist's, constructing both. She left it open on purpose. One brain, two brains, three, depending on where you decide to stand.
Bethany Webster found herself somewhere else again: space, literally outer space, with some elements pressed up close to her eye and others pulling far away, the way certain electronic music places a loud sound right next to something distant like an echo. She loved the ambiguity of whether a mark was meant to be heard or seen, whether a thin line was string or something symbolically enormous. Anything could happen at any moment in that painting, she said, and that unresolved quality was exactly the appeal.
Jernej Horvat named something closer to discomfort, though a productive kind. Walking in, his first feeling was almost pain, the sense of something about to be revealed that stays just short of revealing itself. He imagined passing one of these paintings every day and being triggered differently each time, caught in the gap between wanting clarity and never quite getting it. Not pain exactly. Annoyance, maybe, but the good kind, the kind that sits inside otherwise peaceful color and keeps you a little off balance. Finished, for him, but finished in a way that keeps inviting you deeper without ever letting you all the way in.
And then Jesse Van Mouwerik brought the room's own architecture into the conversation without necessarily meaning to. He wanted to cut out the floor, the actual painted paper floor, and mount it on the wall like the other pieces, because what he loved most was the tension between the colorful marks and the negative space around them. Looking at one particular canvas without that tension, he felt its absence almost physically, bothered by a painting for withholding what the room had trained him to expect. It's worth saying again here: the floor he wanted to frame was not a separate artwork. It was the studio itself, stained by the same hand, and by the time he said it out loud, none of us were entirely sure anymore where Stein's paintings ended and the room began. Which might be the whole point. We left Franz's room still turning things over in our heads, and walked straight into Rosalie's.
Rosalie Werthefrongel has been called a modern pirate, someone who hijacks Renaissance painting and Romanticism and New Objectivity and Surrealism with total confidence, then updates the loot. She collects objects first, toys, flea market finds, things that already carry someone's memory, alongside photographs and a large digital archive. From that pile she builds small stage sets, photographs them, then works them over digitally, keeping the glitches editing produces along the way. What starts as a digital sketch ends up a painting, built in layers of acrylic, oil, and colored pencil. We walked into her room already primed to notice a sky. Two of the paintings that stopped people longest were both skies, but not natural ones. One showed contrails against blue, watermarks from stock photography still faintly visible across the surface, a small yellow post-it note pinned into the composition like an afterthought that refused to be edited out. The other took the same sky and broke it into collage, crossed by a birthday banner, the kind you'd hang for a child's party, its letters spelling out the beginning of HAPPY before the canvas cuts it off.
Francis Kalathoti opened this room's conversation by naming the feeling directly: this is how a child sees the world. Clouds that are more blue than clouds actually are, more surreal, more alive, because a child's eyes haven't yet learned to flatten wonder into habit. Looking at something for the first time, before your view of the world has fully formed, means looking at it with the kind of attention adults spend a lifetime trying to get back. Annie Moreau picked up the collage elements almost like an Easter egg hunt, trying to work out what the fragmented letters stood for, tracing how the practice she'd just heard described (the toys, the found objects, the digital layering) showed up physically in the final piece. A sky, she said, is never just a sky. It's a collection of things in dialogue, and once you notice that, you're free to build your own story out of it. Which, she added, is what art is supposed to let you do anyway. Amir Mahdian went further into the mechanics of memory itself. For him the geometry and the negative space meant the painting wasn't inspired by memory so much as it was capturing it directly, freezing several flashbacks side by side. The three blue panels read as the same memory and three separate ones at once, held apart by their framing, and the grayer, vaguer section beside them felt like a memory you can't quite pull back into focus. He connected it to something almost universal: a child looks at the sky and it's fascinating, an adult looks at the same sky and it's just weather, not because the sky changed but because we stopped paying attention. The painting doesn't argue with that. It just hands the fascination back. Maybe, he guessed, it's the sky from one particular birthday, the HAP catching in his mind and finishing itself as happy birthday before he could stop it. Bethany Webster built directly on that, calling the painting a snapshot of a snapshot, someone else's fleeting inner collage caught mid-feeling. All of us are walking around generating microsecond feelings all day, she pointed out, each of us carrying our own private, unrepeatable archive of memories and symbols. Seeing one held still on a wall makes that invisible archive suddenly visible.
Annie Moreau came back a second time to tie the room together: the mundane treated as extraordinary, a birthday banner nobody usually looks at twice, recontextualized until it asks to be noticed. Paying that kind of attention to ordinary things, she said, sky to banner, street to house, is its own quiet form of homage.
Sissy Marino followed the thread back to something specific and personal, a memory of lying on the grass at her old university in Italy a few months earlier, watching contrails cut across the sky for twenty unhurried minutes with friends, the kind of looking up that we mostly stopped doing once we had somewhere else to look. She thought about how, centuries ago, people had nothing but that same grass and that same sky and all the time in the world, and how the entire history of cloud science probably started with someone exactly that bored and exactly that content to just watch.
Mattia closed the second room by describing what pulled him into one particular piece without quite being able to say why at first. Looking closer, he found not one sky but two, three, layered, and read that layering as a picture of how a mind actually works while doing something else entirely, driving, say, images and unrelated memories surfacing on their own logic. Not all of them beautiful. All of them, somehow, still worth having. The circle closed the way it usually does, with thanks passed around a room that had, by then, stopped being two separate studios in our heads. One room gave us a wall that was also a brain that was also a map. The other gave us a sky that was also a memory that was also, somehow, a birthday nobody in the circle had actually attended. We didn't ask the artists to explain either room to us. We didn't need to.
Mae creates spaces where art becomes a catalyst for contemplation, expression, and open, safe dialogue. Every voice in that circle adds to a story worth keeping, and we keep archiving them because together they're writing something rarer than criticism: an authentic record of how real people actually think, in their own words.
Between Reality and Imagination - Studio Visit & Symposium, courtesy of König Galerie, 25 July 2026. With Franz Stein and Rosalie Werthefrongel.
