Raus aus der Ecke // Lara Werth

In the organizer's words:

With the exhibition "Raus aus der Ecke", Lara Wertheinmal shows once again the extent to which physical borderline experiences, mental states of emergency and urban pictorial spaces merge in her artistic practice. At the center is the new, large-format work "A Few Miles" (2025), accompanied by smaller works such as "Hill Sprints" (2024) or "Water Loading" (2025), which have emerged directly from a physical and mental process: running as a form of thought, as resistance, as preparation.

Werth's drawings are not illustrations of physical movement, but visual condensations of inner states. The body serves not as a subject, but as a medium. The artistic space begins in its limits of exhaustion; a space that is transferred to the paper in lines, condensations and shifts. As with CyTwombly, whose writing movements became sign systems, or Hanne Darboven, who translated thought into rhythmic numbers, Werth creates a language of repetition, of resistance - but without a calculated structure, instead interspersed with heat, fatigue and thirst.

"It is the subjugation of one's own personality to a self-chosen fate," writes Werth. A sentence reminiscent of the ascetic strategies of artists such as Ana Mendieta or Agnes Martin. But where Mendieta carved the ritual into the ground or Martin made lines for meditation, Werth's language is louder, closer to the body, more fragile. Her works arise from a state in which discipline becomes excessive demands and finds expression precisely in this. In a diary entry from December 3, 2024, she describes the circumstances of her creation:

"It's not about fat, it's not about muscle mass - it's about water. I run, in several layers, in a sweat suit, while the sun burns. [...] The hunger is long gone. What remains is this thirst - and the memory of why I'm doing this."

This running - for example during a weight cut in Thailand before a boxing match - is both preparation and an artistic state. This experience gives rise to pictorial spaces that oscillate between overstimulation and structure. Her large-format drawings are like urban hidden objects that reveal the precarious balance of urban life and condense 'reality' into a visual state of emergency. Using Sharpie, chalk, oil pencil and ink, Werth creates urban landscapes of power lines, train tracks, flying highway intersections, fight clubs and mangrove forests; populated by animals, dinosaurs and primeval fish. In their anarchic pictorial logic or abundance, they are reminiscent of the fantastic scenes of Hieronymus Bosch, the symbol-laden density of Philip Guston or the chaotic urbanity of Franz Ackermann; however, Werth's drawings do not follow a cartographic structure, but an inner, narrative flow.

"My works tell of this state of emergency - of the loss of control and the will to carry on regardless. They are teeming, overloaded, full of exhaustion and longing."

"Out of the corner" refers to Werth's own boxing practice. The corner of the ring: a place of brief respite, but also of limitation. The artist describes it as a symbol of creative work under pressure - waiting, functioning, keeping oneself ready. But the real goal is to break out:

"For me, getting out of the corner means getting out of limitation. Out of functioning. Out of repetition. Out of the comfort zone. And into something that is not safe - but real."

This movement is visible in Werth's lines, in the composition of the picture, in the chaos. Her works do not document a linear process, but rather the attempt to capture an inner chaos and make it visible without smoothing it out. It is an art that does not explain, but perseveres. A visual practice that oscillates between the poles of self-control and dissolution. Not a narrative of triumph, but a visualized state of inner work.

"The pain is sometimes greater than the memory of the reason. And then I keep running anyway," Werth writes.

Her drawings capture this state: not as a heroine's narrative, but as a contradictory, exhausted, deeply human attempt not to stand still.

- Aileen Treusch, June 2025