peel the silver from the distance
and carry the window home
-Drenched Co.
At the opening of the exhibition, my wife and I stood before one of Jochen Mühlenbrink’s blue-green windows in Cuturi’s new London gallery. I asked why he had stuck what looked like silver tape across the painting. He fixed me with piercing blue eyes and said that if I could peel it away, the painting was mine.
I moved closer, looking for that slight edge where tape betrays canvas. The tape was paint.
Jochen told me the blur in his paintings came from spray cans. I had read its soft, even haze as airbrushing, and as our conversation moved towards street art, another history entered the can. It carries the speed of a fugitive mark, the body close to the wall. Here, it makes the landscape withdraw.
Draw a finger through condensation and it will leave the mark of somebody standing close to the glass. In Jochen's paintings, the smiley face and wandering lines appear as evidence of that body, though breath and finger exist only in the painting’s memory. Mühlenbrink makes permanent an encounter the surface has invented.
Window Seat gives us the world as a view while keeping the body sealed inside. SIN and LON become places passing beyond the glass, held in the blur between departure and arrival. We remain somewhere along that route, looking through a pane which appears to remember every touch, keeping each one on its surface.
I had already encountered these paintings on social media, where their language had reached me ahead of the work. In the gallery, scale and surface return some uncertainty to the eye, although once the first strip of painted tape has caught you, the later works can begin to feel like variations on a wager whose answer is already known.
Still, his offer stayed with me. Find the edge between image and object and the window can come home. I left with the faint sensation of silver beneath my nail, the bodily memory of an edge that had only ever been paint.
See https://www.cuturigallery.com/exhibitions/148-sin-lon-window-seat-jochen-muhlenbrink/
See also https://www.jochen-muehlenbrink.com/
See also https://www.soaked.space/2026/09/exhibition-review-jochen-muhlenbrink.html
Caption: Image above: Installation view, Jochen Mühlenbrink, SIN – LON: Window Seat, Cuturi Gallery London, 2026.
Image courtesy of the artist and Cuturi Gallery.
We take great care not to harm the image in any way. And these views, they are ours only and not those of the gallery or artist.
#drenchedco #soakedspace #JochenMuhlenbrink #CuturiGallery #CuturiGalleryLondon #SINLONWindowSeat
