On 12th September 2025, Galerie Russi Klenner is pleased to present Season 4, episode 3, the first solo exhibition by artist Stella Winter.

Winter positions herself as director rather than traditional painter, crafting figurative scenarios that blur the boundaries between documentation and fiction. She captures moments through her iPhone camera — partly staged, partly spontaneous — then proceeds with further manipulation during the painting process. This hybrid approach reflects her intuitive ease and freedom when transferring the digital into the analogue.

Recurring objects trace connecting narratives throughout her work: fallen teeth, opened condom packages, loose hair in food generate potential storylines that make her painted world and its inhabitants more vivid. Her fresh interpretation of still lifes, often from bird’s-eye perspectives, elevates everyday banality to fine art status through her particular humor. Drawing inspiration from 2010s aesthetics — films, music, clothes, Instagram filters, Snapchat filters, Tumblr — her work remains current as these trends resurface in contemporary culture.

More recently, Winter has begun experimenting with split screens, a reference taken directly from TikTok that playfully address the fragmented attention spans of her generation. Oversaturated photos and Instagram filter elements populate these compositions, creating a bridge between visual digital and analogue realms when inserted into the fine art context.

Her paintings expose the fundamental tension between canvas and screen, with the subverted canvas transformed into personalized screens by the artist. The act of painting friends and weekend-like tables expresses a need to document spaces of communion — both physical and virtual — that mark how her generation builds affection and intimacy. The internet becomes the main space of familiarity; as it moves, she moves, and her paintings follow along.

Winter’s unique irony emerges in bringing digital representation onto traditional canvas. Elements such as Instagram filters, iconic phone games, and social media formats find new life within the somewhat traditional form of canvas painting, making her works come alive through this ironic approach where she finds herself most authentic.

For this exhibition, Winter transforms the gallery space into an extended split screen by mirroring the floors. Visitors walk into an extended resting phone environment where all the paintings split, mirror, distort and duplicate. Alongside the mirrored installation, a sofa piece takes elements from every painting and animates them into three-dimensional space, completing the full circle of her practice where works play off each other in constant dialogue.