AroundSpace Gallery is honored to present Swiss artist Kotscha Reist’s solo exhibition, A Portable Corner, showcasing his recent works, as an inaugural exhibition in the newly renovated space.

Kotscha Reist has an ability to create an image that brings us back to our memory. A pile of books or archives, a stack of boxes, a knocked-over bucket, a snow-covered pine tree, a silhouette of a grand piano, a lonely chandelier, a corner of a living room, a catalog left on a bed, everything and anything can be Reist’s inspiration for paintings. He depicts nature, landscape, forests, mountains, and meadows, as well as urban scenes, cityscapes, interiors. These thematic fragments bring together a feeling of incompleteness, a desire to reveal, and a chain of floating thoughts.

Kotscha Reist achieves this by using a very distinguished approach. When painting familiar everyday objects and scenes, he uses an unusual perspective and composition, re-assigning meanings to relics of everyday life, perhaps thanks to his earlier experience in photography. In his canvases even an empty room can tell an intriguing story. In his most recent work, Staircase to the Paradisstudio, he masterfully represented the texture of different architecture surfaces - cement stairs, metal railings, wall paints, and so on, using exquisite and accurate brushstrokes and delicate colors and tones, capturing the light and atmosphere and bringing viewers to the spot immediately. While in My Favorite Catalog, Reist depicted his favorite corner of his studio, where he reposes and relaxes, but also reflects and recharges. It is a portable corner that never leaves him, always holding a comfortable and peaceful spot in his mind. The red carpet is like a spark, igniting Reist’s memory and reminding the viewers of their own experiences and unspoken emotions.

Literature is one of his inspirations. Reist claims that he “write(s) pictures, the narration is the story.” In his Content series and other smaller works, he paints as if he writes in the first person, creating intimate and inexplicit images. Hemingway believed that a writer should be able to create something that “will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory.” Similarly, Reist’s painting created images and scenes that may not be noticed, but will be easily recalled, and these images and scenes will enter our memory and become part of our experience.

There are certain memories or images that we carry with us our entire life. All the corners in space and moments in time are portable corners that will haunt us, and continuously nurture us and enable us to get through an ordinary, but honest life.