'The Owner' by Vera Palme at PSM, Berlin

“If the Ladies were squirrels with them high bushy tails, I’d fill up my shotgun with Rock Salt and Nails.” 

—American folk song

In this exhibition Vera Palme presents a new body of work that continues her interest in the ways landscape painting can hold a gaze. While working with color and loosely earthy shapes in her previous series of paintings, the new work eschews coloration for a nearly monochromatic palette of brown. Blurred into a hodgepodge of muted color, the elements of Palme’s new paintings are both reminiscent of natural shapes as well as tending toward the abstract. The similarity of hue creates a filter through which the underlying composition is viewed, and which also convolutes Palme’s past work. This allows us, as well as the artist herself, to question their very nature—turning painting in on itself.

Palme’s practice is also largely text-based, and for this show presents a new audio piece in which she reads from a forthcoming text. The reading is cyclical in nature, like Palme’s process for the new paintings, working within her own practice as it does.