To Harvest A Promise Dissolving In Heat

selected exhibitions

Galerie ANDREAE | Art Düsseldorf 2026

To Harvest a Promise Dissolving In Heat

„The notion of a singular disaster is a fantasy.“ – What if catastrophe is no longer an event, but a condition—one that has quietly inscribed itself into our images?

Lucia Kempkes’s practice begins precisely at this tipping point: where perception, memory, and projection become indistinguishably entangled. Her works evade both the comfortable logic of retrospection and the spectacular gesture of futurist design. Instead, they operate within a precarious in-between space—an aesthetic field of possibility in which what has been and what is to come mutually destabilize one another.

Rooted in the tradition of landscape painting, Lucia Kempkes develops a radically shifted painterly approach: her works are constructed from individually painted threads, later woven into complex textile surfaces. Painting here does not sit on the surface—it emerges through structure, as a condensation of time, gesture, and decision. Kempkes’ practice unfolds at the threshold where perception, memory, and projection converge. Her new series introduces a speculative botany of the near future. Drawing on real climate adaptation strategies, familiar agricultural landscapes give way to sorghum, okra, amaranth, and lupine. These works do not depict what is, but what might be—quiet, anticipatory images that register subtle yet irreversible shifts in how landscape is formed, perceived, and remembered. Resisting the smoothness of digital image production, Kempkes insists on time-intensive, manual processes.

At the same time, the iconographic horizon of her work shifts decisively. The familiar ciphers of European landscape—the golden wheat field, the promise of summer, growth, and continuity—are subverted by a speculative botany of the near future. Sorghum, okra, amaranth, lupins: plants that have thus far appeared as marginal phenomena become protagonists of an emergent agro-aesthetic. Kempkes draws on real political and scientific scenarios—such as adaptive strategies to climate change—yet translates them into a visual language that is less documentary than anticipatory.

What emerges here are not landscapes in the classical sense, but rather vedute of a time not yet realized —images for viewers who may one day inhabit precisely these environments. Within this displacement lies a quiet but fundamental disturbance: the present suddenly appears as a historical exception, a fleeting constellation among many possible ones. Crucially, Kempkes’ works do not settle into a reductive dystopia. Her future is neither spectacular nor apocalyptic; it is subtle, gradual, almost inconspicuous. Catastrophe, it seems, manifests not as rupture but as a transformation of the taken for granted: in the color of fields, in the texture of landscapes, in the images we consider “natural.”

A recurring element in her work—the grid of a kitchen cloth—functions as a disquieting anchor. It gestures toward familiarity, everyday life, and cultural continuity, while simultaneously undermining the illusion of an autonomous pictorial space by rendering the fabric itself visible. In this sense, her practice can be understood as a form of minimal intervention—an operation that does not aim for maximum visibility, but for sustained displacement. The works operate quietly, yet insistently. They call for a different mode of seeing: one that allows for uncertainty, recognizes projection, and understands the present not as a measure, but as a question. For if catastrophe is not a singular event but a process that unfolds gradually, then the images, too, must change.

Text by Katja Kamilla Andreae

Photos by Mathias Völzke