TRACES

Vernissage: Friday, June 19, 2026, 7:00 pm
Exhibition duration: June 19 to August 8, 2026

The exhibition "TRACES" by Alexander Kapitanowski and Alexandra Sonntag at Kunstquartier Osnabrück explores traces as a painterly/drawing condensation of experience. Layers, breaks, gestures and subtle superimpositions refer to fragments of memory and emotional resonances. Aesthetically and psychologically, the works show how experience inscribes itself into perception - quietly, but lastingly. The result is a suggestive visual language that touches viewers and sensitizes them to inner processes.

Alexander Kapitanowski's works are a homage to the unfinished / non-finito: the picture appears as an open process of becoming. In the tension between the white ground and the set form, the still-possible remains visible. Colored spots and lumpy details form a counterweight to the empty surroundings and locate the depicted in an imaginary spatiality. Kapitanowski thus moves between iconographic motif and affective color. He combines figuration with dance-like gestures, traces of wind and movement, whereby bodies do not represent but testify to states of transition and memory. For Kapitanowski, images are migrants that move from memories to desires, which is why his works bring together personal and collective memories in a palimpsest and collage-like manner. Drawing his way through motifs from different cultural epochs, he develops as a homo viator a continuing interweaving with artists of the past. His pictures deliberately remain open and unfinished.

Alexandra Sonntag's painting sees itself as a processual notation of world experience.
Her works are not the result of representation, but of the condensation of perception: color, line and surface function as carriers of an immediate, physically bound experience. In the act of painting, energy is bundled, channeled and transformed into a visual language that oscillates between control and letting go. Central aesthetic means are layering, transparency and gestural placement. Color spaces are superimposed, opened up and then discarded again; lines appear as traces of an inner rhythm. This results in pictorial structures that are less self-contained than in motion. The category of the fragment plays just as important a role as that of resonance: each element is related, responds to the previous one, modulates tensions. The painting process itself follows an intuitive flow in which decision and chance intertwine. Sonntag understands this state as a form of heightened attention, in which external impressions and internal sensations merge inseparably. The canvas thus becomes a resonance space in which perception sediments - not as an image, but as a trace. This openness is an invitation to the viewer: The pictures do not demand an unambiguous reading, but rather enable a shared understanding. They touch where one's own spaces of experience connect, where perception begins to vibrate and new, often unspoken meanings unfold.