Elizabeth Jaeger + Phillip Gabriel | Resent the Sky + Chroma Trigger | KLEMM’S | 10.09.-18.10.2025

Elizabeth Jaeger – Resent the Sky

Resent the Sky, Elizabeth Jaeger’s third solo exhibition at Klemm’s, presents a visual choreography navigating grief and power. A chorus of coffin-sized steel frames is rigorously ordered throughout the gallery, each bearing gunmetal-blackened tubes that reach skyward. Planted inside these upright barrels are hand-formed ceramic flowers—fragile, fire-hardened, and laboriously made. They present as offering, protest, and aftermath. Together, they rise in a strict yet undulating gradient behind a reclining sculpture of two species. The two figures lie in intentionally nightmarish ambiguity: tenderness laced with violence, protection entangled with control. As an installation, Resent the Sky wrestles with Weltschmerz, heartbreak, and scale shock—how grief is painfully suspended between the intense intimacy of personal loss and the overwhelming abstraction of mass tragedy.

Phillip Gabriel – Chroma Trigger

Phillip Gabriel, Hand of Regret, 2022, detail

Chroma Trigger presents a group of paintings centered on the motif of hands, including a selection from the series Spoleto. Gabriel’s works steal and layer fleeting images into congealed surfaces of finessed oil, each canvas a cluster of small vignettes and sketchy redactions. They act like fleeting dreams—glimpses of moody skies, masked faces, limbs stabilized with metal—forming dense, dreamlike fields that blur the line between memory and media. Inspired by Filipino jeepneys—WWII trucks transformed into vibrant, mobile shrines to pop culture and faith— Gabriel’s paintings draw parallels between his use of found images and the vibrant decorations on the Filipino jeepney that became a popular mode of public transportation growing out of the vestiges of colonialism and military occupation. In doing so, his paintings channel a punchy collision of symbols, serving as moving containers for histories, desires, and improvisations that resist a single origin.

Vernissage: Wednesday, 10. September 2025, from 6 to 9 pm