“Diversion”, the title of Vera Palme’s latest series, feels like both a misdirection and a mission statement. In the crisp, restrained setting of Kunsthalle Winterthur, Palme’s new body of work unfolds as a controlled chaos – a constellation of green-toned paintings that suggest movement, only to undermine it. Each canvas, uniform in format, offers a tangle of spiraling brushwork and murky arrows that seem to promise direction, yet lead nowhere. Or rather, everywhere. Or maybe back to themselves.
It’s disorientation with intention.
📽️ a glimpse of the exhibition in my latest Instagram reel for an immersive preview! Click here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKHIcdXNh_k/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
At first glance, the repeated motif of the arrow evokes a navigational symbol, something utilitarian. But these arrows are weary, wayward. They point in no clear direction, their authority as signifiers dissolved in layers of tangled brushstrokes. Palme doesn’t guide – she questions the very act of pointing.
Her strategy reads as a quiet resistance to linearity, clarity, and perhaps to the didactic demands often placed on painting today. There is a sense of painterly exhaustion in these works – and yet also a refusal to give up. As the exhibition text observes, Palme plays with the romantic ideal of painting as a bearer of meaning, emotion, or truth – only to sabotage it gently, intelligently, and with humor. Her canvases seem to echo with the ghosts of painting’s past ambitions while dragging those ideals through contemporary unease.
She does not abandon painting, but she stages its frailty, its uncertainty. The brushwork transitions between precision and dissolution; motifs are summoned only to be dismantled. The result is a deeply self-aware practice that straddles homage and critique. In the exhibition, painting appears as both relic and rehearsal – a site of projection, of frustration, and of belief that flickers in and out of view.
By the time viewers reach the back of the exhibition space, the cumulative effect is one of overstimulation and subtle erosion. Nothing fully resolves, and that’s precisely the point. Palme’s work exists in a kind of flickering space between states: image and non-image, sincerity and parody, structure and collapse.
In a moment when painting is still caught between claims of autonomy and calls for political urgency, Vera Palme carves out a third space – one of poetic sabotage. “Diversion” is not just a detour. It’s a portrait of painting as a haunted, restless, but still breathing medium.
🖼️✨ more about Vera Palme: https://kunsthallewinterthur.ch/aktuelle-ausstellung Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isabelbergant/
Read more on my previous Blogposts:
Post 1: Women in Art: A Journey Through Milan’s Galleries and Museums https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/03/10/women-in-art-a-journey-through-milans-galleries-and-museums-isaberg98/
Post 2: Crash of Colors at KKL Lucerne https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/03/15/crash-of-colors-at-kkl-lucerne-christine-streuli-isaberg98/
Post 3: Lucerne: Roma Stories with Needle and Thread (Video included) https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/03/25/lucerne-roma-stories-with-needle-and-thread-video-included-isaberg98/
Post 4: Who owns the stars? https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/04/21/who-owns-the-stars-isaberg98/
Post 5: Aperol & Art: Alba’s Playful Vernissage in Basel (Reel included) https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/05/05/aperol-art-albas-playful-vernissage-in-basel-reel-included-isaberg98/
Post 6: Stolen Negatives, Erased Credit – The story of Lucia Moholy https://blog.hslu.ch/majorobm/2025/05/17/stolen-negatives-erased-credit-the-story-of-lucia-moholy-isaberg98/
Palme’s use of directionless arrows made me think about how much we rely on clarity—even in art—to feel grounded. Her refusal to offer straightforward answers feels oddly reassuring in a world that constantly demands interpretation and certainty.
That’s such a thoughtful observation. I completely agree—Palme’s ambiguous arrows seem to challenge our impulse to seek clear narratives or fixed meanings. It’s almost as if she’s inviting us to sit with uncertainty, to embrace not knowing. In a way, that openness creates space for a more personal and intuitive connection to the work, which can be surprisingly grounding in itself. 🙂