Sprüth Magers, Berlin
On view through October 25, 2025
At Sprüth Magers Berlin, Finnish artist Henni Alftan’s new exhibition, By the Skin of My Teeth, invites viewers on a journey to the edges of the everyday. The title, drawn from the English idiom meaning “to narrowly escape,” reflects the delicate threshold that permeates Alftan’s work—the fragile boundary between reality and abstraction. Her paintings evoke a world where “success” or “existence” hangs by a thread.
Alftan masterfully manipulates scale, perspective, and texture to infuse ordinary scenes with an unsettling mystery. Her realism emerges not from an abundance of detail but from a pared-down gaze. With near-abstract simplicity, she captures moments of daily life that feel both mundane and intuitively disquieting: an eye behind oversized sunglasses, a watch on a gloved wrist, a flashlight’s beam spilling beyond the frame.
The exhibition features her oil paintings alongside a new series of drawings on colored paper. These small-scale works present everyday objects—a key, a nail, a match, a tooth—in a geometric arrangement, intensifying the focus of the gaze.
Alftan’s paintings engage in silent dialogues with one another. In Pour (Déjà-vu) (2025), milk is poured into a glass, still contained within its walls; in contrast, Flood (2025) depicts water overflowing, engulfing cars. This interplay forms part of her “Déjà-vu” series of paired paintings, capturing two states of the same scene, like the difference between two breaths.
While representing everyday objects, Alftan subtly connects to the traditions of trompe-l’œil and still life. The white passe-partouts around her canvases evoke a museum vitrine aesthetic, creating a sense of both distance and intimacy for the viewer.
In what Alftan describes as “paintings about painting itself,” the materiality of paint becomes a subject in its own right. In Hand in Pocket (2025), the texture of fabric is recreated on the canvas’s surface; in Haircut (2024), strands of hair about to be cut take on a raised form through thick brushstrokes.
Some paintings are enriched with art-historical references. Overpass (2025) evokes Monet’s bridges and Hiroshige’s landscapes, yet these images dissolve into an almost abstract highway void. Such “visual transfers” showcase Alftan’s ability to blend contemporary visual culture with classical painting.
In Alftan’s world, the everyday intertwines with visual memory. Objects are familiar yet estranged by their familiarity. Her meticulously composed paintings question the limits of perception, the haziness of recollection, and the fragile nature of representation.
By the Skin of My Teeth makes visible the delicate balance that defines Alftan’s practice: a constant oscillation between the ordinary and the extraordinary, distance and closeness, the abstract and the concrete. The artist reminds us how fragile, how “narrowly escaped,” the act of seeing truly is.
