Until August 9, von Bartha presents a solo exhibition by Caroline Achaintre, titled Eye Level, which brings forth a collection of works that peer back at the viewer as much as they are observed—gazing, shifting, waiting. Installed across wall, plinth, and floor, Achaintre’s textile pieces, watercolors, and ceramics oscillate between object and subject, abstraction and figuration, presence and apparition. The forms suggest many things—masks, garments, beasts, spirits—but pin down none. Instead, they inhabit the exhibition space like a cast of uncertain characters in a silent play, each one inviting projection while resisting interpretation.
Born in Toulouse in 1969, raised in Germany, and now based in London, Achaintre’s cosmopolitan trajectory is echoed in the multiplicity of her visual language. Over the past two decades, her practice has been marked by a deliberate refusal to settle—into a medium, a style, or even a cultural frame. Her installations often evoke mise-en-scènes populated by strange characters: part-puppet, part-relic, part-guardian. In Eye Level, she extends this theatre into the space of the viewer, staging an encounter that is as much psychological as physical. Whether suspended, crouched, or stretching across the wall, her works maintain an uncanny stillness—watchful, paused, alive. Achaintre’s influences are as plural as her materials: European carnival customs, German Expressionism, science fiction, prehistoric relics, museum façades, and animist cosmologies. “I process anything that triggers my imagination,” she says. This is evident in the hybrid nature of her forms—part folklore, part glitch. Felted wool becomes skin; ceramic becomes bone or armour; watercolour bleeds into spectral faces. The works seem haunted by their construction, caught between animation and collapse.
As a result, when visiting the show, one can argue it seems to unfold like a theatre of masks—silent, woolen, glistening with glaze, or drawn in washes of spectral watercolor. Across the gallery space, her sculptures, textiles, and drawings assume a low mutter of presence, always watching. They stare back. They slouch, hover, hide in plain sight. At times, they seem stuck mid-metamorphosis: too human to be object, too inert to be animal, too strange to be named. Achaintre’s forms resist easy categorisation. They hint at the figure, but quickly recede into abstraction. There’s a pelted face, or is it a mask? A twisted torso, or only the memory of one. Hairless beasts stitched from dyed wool lean toward us with open mouths and hollow eyes, while glazed ceramics sit like relics, their function long since forgotten, their meaning grown strange with time. The result is a world of hybrid presences: ghostly yet solid, absurd yet reverent, comic yet solemn. These are works that ask to be seen at eye level—but also at gut level, at skin level. The effect is not disorientation, but an invitation to linger in the in-between. To dwell in that soft, wordless space where emotion precedes understanding. Where, as Achaintre’s hybrids remind us, the line between subject and object, self and other, art and life, remains beautifully unresolved.
For more information, please consult the gallery’s website here.
Cover image: Installation view of “Caroline Achaintre: Eye Level” (2025) at von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland. Photo: Philipp Hänger / von Bartha. Image courtesy the artist and von Bartha.
Last Updated on October 2, 2025
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About the author:
Maxim Foucquet is a curator, art critic, and contemporary artist residing and working in Belgium.
