ChertLüdde, Berlin
🗓️ On view through November 8, 2025
Norwegian artist Tyra Tingleff invites viewers into an almost bodily intensity with her new exhibition Pulse / Pause at ChertLüdde in Berlin. The exhibition pushes the boundaries of abstract painting, merging the ambiguity of forms with the unspoken realms of the female experience.
In Tingleff’s canvases, paint is not merely a tool; it feels like a breathing, pulsing entity. Deep reds, purples, and dark shadows blend to create tension on the surface—a constant struggle between balance and chaos, flow and stillness. The paint sometimes overflows, drips, or collapses under its own weight. This vibration evokes both an inner rhythm and the existential fragility of the female body.
Unlike her earlier works, Pulse / Pause carries a more systematic structure. Yet, within this order, a sense of spontaneity and “happenstance” persists. Some paintings feature two dense paint focal points, while others have six or seven, each pulsing like a heartbeat at the canvas’s core.
Tingleff’s compositions reveal implied states of the body: abstract forms that sometimes morph into flowers, organs, or early goddess figures. Echoing Georgia O’Keeffe’s erotic floral abstractions or Joan Snyder’s Body and Soul series, these works are imbued with a feminine intuition. However, Tingleff doesn’t directly represent this feminine energy; she conceals it within layers of paint.
Accompanying the exhibition, Tess Brown-Lavoie’s short poetry collection Proprietary Method / June July complements the paintings’ language. The concept of “Mother Painting” in the poems symbolizes a cycle of creation where each canvas births the next, copying and disrupting one another. This cycle, like a heartbeat, embodies continuity: breath, repetition, devotion.
In Tingleff’s canvases, “pulse” and “pause” do not compete; they complete each other. The silence in this interval allows us to listen to the paintings’ inner rhythm. This visual language, bridging the movement of paint and the vibration of emotion, invites viewers into a space that is both bodily and emotional.
Pulse / Pause is one of the most personal narratives to emerge from abstract painting: as passionate as a pulse, as fragile as a pause.
