ELKE FOLTZ — BALANCE IN CHAOS
Circle Culture Gallery, Opening July 4, 2025
Curated by Johann Alexis von Haehling
At once delicate and assertive, Elke Foltz’s abstract paintings articulate a world in flux, a space where memory, gesture, emotion and form intersect to reveal a quiet yet potent human poetics. In her first solo exhibition with Circle Culture Gallery, Balance in Chaos, Foltz offers a body of work that invites viewers into an intimate unguarded process of becoming, one shaped by displacement, renewal and the search for emotional coherence in a fractured world.
Rooted in personal history but untethered from any singular narrative, Foltz’s visual language is layered, open-ended and deeply intuitive. Born and raised in the suburbs of Paris with a French-German-Senegalese heritage, she recalls drawing as her earliest form of expression, a tool for translating emotion when words fell short. Her peripatetic childhood from Seine-et-Marne to Angola to Poitou-Charentes instilled a capacity for adaptation that continues to inform her creative process, a visual and emotional negotiation between the known and the unknown.
This search for identity not in binary terms but as a composite, a fullness, echoes throughout her practice. “I am not half this or half that” she affirms. “I am whole.” Painting becomes a means to integrate the many layers of her being, especially in relation to the question of roots. Her understanding of cultural inheritance came initially through her parents’ stories and sensibilities, her father’s quiet drawing practice, her mother’s intuitive love of color. Over time this inheritance has become self-possessed as Foltz engages more directly with her Senegalese ancestry, her German present and her internal landscape as a woman navigating artistic autonomy.
Foltz’s move to Berlin marked a pivotal shift both personally and aesthetically. In the solitude and rawness of the city she found space to confront unresolved emotional terrain. It was here during the global stillness of the Covid era that her practice began to shift from illustration toward full abstraction. Letting go of the need for representation she embraced form and color as conduits for internal movement. The transition was not abrupt but organic, the meticulous detail and rhythm of her earlier drawings evolved into compositions driven by sensation, tension and emotional resonance. With this shift came a powerful realization that so-called failure in life and in art was no longer a source of shame but of renewal. “Every pain, every experience became an opportunity for something new.”
In many ways Balance in Chaos is both a title and a methodology. Foltz’s paintings stage a dialogue between clarity and disruption, harmony and rupture. Colors vibrate, collide and converge, shapes pulse and resist closure. Yet within this visual turbulence emerges a sense of resolution not through control but through relational balance. Her compositions often reveal themselves slowly through contrast and negotiation, like ecosystems finding equilibrium. The act of painting becomes an embodied metaphor for how to hold complexity, tension and contradiction not as problems to be solved but as conditions to be lived.
Her studio practice is built on this same principle of layered engagement. Each canvas begins with a felt impulse, an emotion, a color or a shape which she sketches rapidly. Alongside this she writes notes that accompany the work’s evolution. These writings are not preparatory texts but intimate reflections, fragments of thought that mirror the painting’s unfolding. “A painting often responds to questions I’m not fully conscious of” she explains. This ongoing conversation between text and gesture, thought and form infuses her work with a rare emotional clarity. It is a space of inquiry as much as of expression.
Materiality plays a key role in this process. Foltz favors ink and dry pigment, media that offer no possibility for erasure. Their immediacy demands presence, inviting vulnerability. The layering and occasional collaging of fragments from previous works are more than aesthetic strategies, they are philosophical gestures speaking to continuity, memory and the reclamation of so-called errors. These repurposed pieces carry the imprint of past decisions and unresolved moments, woven into new contexts as acts of quiet resilience.
For this exhibition the paintings are accompanied by a sonic element that deepens the dialogic atmosphere of the space. Berlin-based musician Bastian Duncker, known for his improvisational work on saxophone, clarinet and ney, will perform live during the opening reception. His recorded pieces weaving tonal leaps with moments of stillness continue throughout the exhibition, forming a vivid aural dialogue with Foltz’s gestural lexicon. The interplay between sound and image, rhythm and composition offers another dimension of resonance, a sensory field in which movement, breath and presence converge.
Ultimately Foltz’s work is a space for pause, for emotional recalibration in a world that often demands resolution without reflection. Viewers are invited not to decipher but to feel, to let their own inner tensions meet the work’s textures, silences and collisions. What emerges is not an answer but a mood, a question, a trace, a space in which the personal becomes shared and chaos gives way to its own kind of balance.
