Berlin-based painter Franziska Goes makes abstractions that allude to the visually familiar while simultaneously defying overt legibility. She is sensitively informed by personal observations and encounters with her surroundings. Physical and sensorial experiences of lush nature, pulsating cityscapes, and the realm of technology collide and coalesce, mediated and transmuted in her pictures through painterly impulses as orderly and referential as they are playful and intuitive.

Arranged within a frontal space that directly faces the viewer, Goes’ paintings create spatiality not through illusionistic depth, but through the relationship between the colored surfaces themselves. Her process is defined by both harmony and dissonance, combining intuition, freedom, and coincidence with formal rigor and constraint. Using a limited but vibrant color palette, she layers hues, experimenting with their values, relationships, and textures to create atmospheric landscapes filled with tension and balance. Goes blends traditional painting techniques with references to digital aesthetics, such as pixelated patterns and screen-like blur effects, while also embracing the textural possibilities of the materiality of the paint and varied mark-making. The result is a dynamic interplay of shapes, colors, and textures that collide, overlap, and coexist in a state of energetic flux and endless possibility.

Goes’ abstract paintings navigate the tension between the organic and the artificial, the tactile and the digital, offering a nuanced reflection on contemporary life. Her approach to abstraction is inherently poetic—rooted in a desire to offer a visual language that captures both the fragmentation and the unity of the present. She invites the viewer into a space where the familiar and the unfamiliar harmonize, where visual cues from nature, architecture, and technology are transmuted through the medium of paint. Her works are not merely exercises in formal abstraction; they are rich, textured explorations of how color, form, and texture can evoke a range of emotional and sensory responses. Her paintings ask the viewer to suspend their usual expectations of representation and engage with the visual world in a more immediate, visceral way.

In this sense, Goes' paintings are both highly personal and universally resonant, capturing the lived tension between the digital and the physical, the natural and the constructed. Each work operates like a window into a broader, often contradictory reality, where meaning emerges not from fixed definitions, but from the interplay of opposing forces. Goes offers a vision of abstraction that is deeply tied to the present moment—one that simultaneously acknowledges the challenges of our time and offers an open space for sensory exploration, emotional engagement, and visual delight.