Curatorial Review
by Oleksandr Dyvnich
Esther Wiederhold has developed a practice with a genuinely unusual premise: she hangs her paintings on trees in the forest, photographs them in situ, and works from those images. This is not merely an eccentric method but a conceptual proposition — that a painting and its natural context are in active relationship, each transformed by the other. The six works presented here suggest that this idea has shaped not only her process but her entire visual vocabulary.
Esther Wiederhold | Autumn
The most consistent formal element across Wiederhold’s figurative work is what might be called the botanical portrait: a female face whose hair, halo, or surrounding field dissolves into foliage, flowers, or seasonal growth. In Autumn, the figure’s auburn hair and the surrounding autumnal canopy become literally indistinguishable — leaves, reds and golds fall and flow between the painted and the growing. Nature’s Pride, rendered in Polychromos pencil, achieves a similar effect in dense greens and earth browns, the figure armoured and crowned in botanical detail. The method differs — loose gestural acrylic versus laborious coloured pencil — but the proposition is the same: the human face is a place where nature thinks.
Esther Wiederhold | Nature`s pride
The most formally striking individual work is Fairy Tale, in which the figure is rendered entirely in a compressed palette of blues and indigos, with warm amber eyes as the sole chromatic exception. The total blue submersion — skin, hair, the loaded brushwork of the background — functions not as stylisation but as metaphysical claim: the figure is not surrounded by a world but dissolved into one. The amber eyes hold the composition in place and give it an uncanny luminosity. This is Wiederhold at her most confident and singular.
Esther Wiederhold | Fairy Tale
Luck (2025) represents a different mode: maximalist, festive, mixed-media. Collaged fragments of handwritten text and music score are layered beneath acrylic flowers, checkerboard motifs and spirals in high-saturation orange, red, blue and purple. The face at its centre is oddly serene, a still point amid visual abundance. The work carries considerable energy, though the collage elements hint at a conceptual depth the composition does not quite fulfil.
Esther Wiederhold | Luck | 2025
Lost is the portfolio’s most distinctive departure. Executed in Polychromos on black paper, it presents a single face staring from extreme shadow, hands clasped tightly beneath the chin. The eyes are enlarged to an almost uncanny degree, the tonal range reduced to grey. There is no botanical symbolism, no seasonal palette: only attention and anxiety. Its presence here reframes the more jubilant works, suggesting that behind the figure who becomes forest there is also a figure who is simply waiting — or watched.
Esther Wiederhold | Lost
The Reality of Dreams closes the group on a reflective note: a warm sienna figure in three-quarter view, self-contained and inward. The densely textured curled hair is rendered with notable technical assurance in the same pencil medium.
Esther Wiederhold | The Reality of Dreams
Wiederhold’s recurring motif — the face crowned or consumed by nature — risks the stability of a signature. That it does not feel exhausted across these six works is in part due to her willingness to change medium, palette and emotional register: from the monochronmatic starkness of charcoal to the chromatic saturation of mixed media, from intimacy to spectacle. The artist’s outdoor practice adds a genuine conceptual dimension to what might otherwise read as decorative symbolism. The decisive question for her work going forward is whether the forest that surrounds her figures can also, occasionally, destabilise them.
