Eleanor Swordy | Say less | Galerie Max Hetzler | 14.11.2025.-17.01.2026

In two paintings from Eleanor Swordy’s new exhibition at the Max Hetzler Gallery in Berlin, a figure in the centre of the canvas looks at the viewer. The eyes of these figures appear veiled, as each of them looks at (or perhaps more accurately, looks through) a task – basket weaving and cutting paper flowers – which their hands perform with somnambulistic attention. Although outward-looking, neither figure is confrontational, but rather completely absorbed in their respective activities, perhaps even appearing somewhat perplexed. Like Swordy, both have long blonde hair – a hint that they are representatives of the painter herself. Swordy’s works often contain elements that allegorically represent their inherent artificiality.

In For You, the lower edge of the painting becomes a surface on which scattered fragments of coloured paper dropped by the flower cutter are collected. In this typically playful manner, Swordy alludes to the objectivity of the painting, with self-reflexivity being an important aspect of her work. Here, as even more clearly in Set Apart, the depicted action and the technical implementation together convey the impression that the surface of the painting embodies (or parallels) a kind of invisible interface or force field. On both sides of this boundary, the foreground and background can be read as different levels of reality; these could in turn be defined as the actual and the virtual, or perhaps as the real and the imaginary or remembered. Narratives are therefore suggested as much by formal characteristics as by pictorial descriptions; the self recedes behind the world of activities or gazes dreamily through glass into a dreamlike world beyond.