Escape Velocity

Escape Velocity, a term borrowed from physics, names the minimum speed a body needs to leave a gravitational field for good. Jonas Hödicke and Kiki Karnstein take that threshold as a shared question: what keeps images and memory bound to a familiar path, and what happens once the pull persists but return is no longer possible.

Jonas Hödicke studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Markus Lüpertz and Siegfried Anzinger. His sculptures in wire and steel read like drawings extended into space, their form defined as much by interstices and cast shadow as by the metal itself. Paintings and drawings extend the same interplay of tension and resistance onto a flat surface.

Kiki Karnstein is the artistic name of Kirstin Buchinger, an art historian and curator who also publishes as an author. She founded the YVA Archive Berlin. Her practice began in analogue photography, in black-and-white darkroom work. Today she builds each image in stages, starting from her own archive and moving through generative AI and digital compositing before a final painterly intervention. Collective visual memory sits at the center of the results: myths and iconic images return in altered form, and the ordinary rules governing space and the body no longer seem to hold. Gravity, too, appears suspended.

Both bodies of work meet on the question of weight. Jonas Hödicke's open metal structures make their material weight feel permeable. Kiki Karnstein's picture spaces seem to float, yet carry a persistent sense of finitude: their forms stay bound for now, their next movement undecided.