ChertLüdde is pleased to present Pulse / Pause, a solo exhibition by Norwegian painter Tyra Tingleff (1984, Norway). Informed by a lived, unspoken femininity, the exhibition embraces the ambiguity of its forms to offer a magnified view—one that verges on the corporeal.

‘Intense’ is one word to describe these paintings. ‘Demanding’ is another, but what stands out is how Tingleff’s paintings feel disarming, immense, and striking. Her practice almost entirely resists the conventions of oil painting, with this series producing expansive, almost atmospheric fields that radiate a pulsing visual energy. In paintings like The risk it takes to blossom (2025), abstract shapes begin to resemble flowers and rounded forms, without ever fully settling into one singular entity.

Oil paint seeps, bleeds, and pools in slow-moving puddles of red and purple, creating surfaces that feel as though they might sag, stretch, or drip beyond the canvases. They are intimate and bodily yet remain detached or severed—as if embodying uncertainty itself: a condition of hesitation, looping recurrence, and refusal to settle.

Born from continued experimentation with the medium, the exhibition shifts away from the looser abstractions of Tingleff’s earlier work and moves toward a more calculated and systematized approach, creating a tension between control and release, symmetry and irregularity, stillness and flow. New to this series is also the unified color palette: Tingleff’s immersive range stays among deep reds, bruised purples, and shadowy undertones—creating the sensation of being enveloped, even swallowed, by the exhibition.

Prominent in these paintings are misshapen focal points. As if piercing the canvas, these pools of paint cause soft gradients of color to swell and gather on the raw linen. Some of Tingleff’s paintings, like To whom I wanted to be. (2025), have merely two such points, while others gather six or seven puddles per painting. Positioned symmetrically, these pools set a shifting rhythm that pulses through the space.

In Matter to you. For you. (2025), these focal points make voluminous spheres that converge to look like a Venus figure from the Upper Paleolithic era, while other paintings begin to resemble fragments of a human body. Like Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual Flower abstraction series (1950s) and Joan Snyder’s Body and soul (1997–98), in which parted legs reveal a purple vulva, Tingleff’s paintings are imbued with a visceral, innate femininity. The undeniable similarities between these works seems to propose something unconscious, like a gut-instinct about the connection between abstraction and the body. But where artists like Snyder are explicit, Tingleff is elusive. As flowers or organs or exposed flesh, Tingleff ’s compositions flirt with figuration without ever fully conceding to it. Any clear depictions are buried within thick layers of paint and abstraction, only ever gesturing towards the corporeal.

Literary references to the body emerge in a chapbook that accompanies the exhibition. Written by American poet Tess Brown-Lavoie, Proprietary method / June july, published by Cutt Press in collaboration with ChertLüdde Books, was composed partly during the same period that Tingleff created her paintings. Serving as a counterpoint to the exhibition, it echoes the paintings’ nearness to the body. Brown-Lavoie writes:

The Mother Painting gives rise to a whole brood of near difference—broad hipped,
cracked on one side, petals cum organs (arterial, umbilical), a lot of tits as well
bodying a suggestion so material that a time-lapse series springs from the forehead
of the original (lest we desire metaphorical, mythological, metaphysical / or practical coherence).

In observing Tingleff’s practice, Brown-Lavoie’s poem frames the paintings as offspring of a “Mother Painting”—each one bearing subtle mutations, fractured symmetries, and visceral, bodily echoes. Brown-Lavoie sees the series not just as bodily, but as the product of certain reproductive logic. In Tingleff’s paintings, forms bloom, rupture, and replicate in succession of each other. They resist tidy resolution and circle back on themselves with a rhythm as persistent as a heartbeat. Brown-Lavoie reads this as an act of devotion, continuing in the same poem: “Devotion is marked through repetition and immersion—a summer sickness whereby this is everything now.”

Tingleff’s paintings in Pulse / Pause become records of embodiment—of labor, emotions and a femininity touched upon instead of directly represented. As with all her paintings, Tingleff’s artworks resist resolution, unfolding through cycles of passion and doubt. All-encompassing, they suggest immersive bodyscapes—not in spite of their ambiguity, but because of it. There are moments of pulse, moments of pause—and in the space between, a visual language unfolds that is both poetic and organic. Tingleff’s works oscillate between states, tracing a rhythm that is at once fragile and enduring.

While a pulse evokes vitality and a pause suggests stillness, neither state dominates here. Instead, the paintings hover in a liminal zone, shifting between extremes. Like fluctuations in an internal landscape, they map a space where the intimate and the abstract move together.