Wentrup is pleased to present Jeehye Song's first exhibition with the gallery hey, I'm still here, opening Friday, January 30th, from 6 to 8 pm. Song was awarded the 2025 Junger Westen Art Prize for painting, accompanied by a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen.

In Stephen Hawking’s black holes, the world curves inward. Mass accumulates, time loses direction, and everything visible is pushed toward a boundary beyond which meaning does not vanish but condenses. Black holes are not emptiness, but excess.

Jeehye Song’s paintings operate in a similar manner. Her work depicts figures that dissolve, shift. Contours are unstable. Identity appears to disintegrate at the very moment of observation.

Bodies flow, skin becomes color, color becomes movement. The fluid evokes both intimacy and unease. Bodily presence is recognizable but not quite tangible. Like water, they are in flux, and that is precisely where the courage lies: their refusal to solidify.

Hawking’s event horizon is a boundary of knowledge. In Song’s paintings, it is the boundary of the self. One does not see the whole, but traces, like light reaching the edge of a black hole.

Black holes in the universe and in painting are sites of transformation, places of extreme proximity; no dissolution occurs, but rather a different way of seeing.

(Text by Tina Wentrup)