Galerie Tobias Naehring is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Sabina Lăpteanu (b. 2000, Chișinău, Moldova) in Germany, comprising ten oil paintings on canvas.

Sabina Lăpteanu’s paintings occupy a territory in which figuration appears less as an iconographic category than as a provisional effect of painterly organisation. Bodies, interiors, ornamental structures and landscape fragments emerge through accumulations of colour, interruptions of surface and shifts in scale, without consolidating into stable pictorial orders. Rather than resolving the relation between abstraction and representation, the works maintain this distinction as a productive condition.

In this sense, the exhibition may be situated within a broader trajectory of postwar painting that understood the image not as the transparent carrier of meaning but as a site of material and conceptual negotiation. Against the ideal of pictorial coherence, painting became a field in which form was continuously subjected to revision, contingency and internal differentiation. Lăpteanu’s work engages this inheritance without reproducing its historical rhetoric.

Her paintings neither return to expressive subjectivity nor adopt distance as a critical posture. Instead, they operate through a sustained oscillation between image and procedure: motifs appear only insofar as they are produced through the material operations of painting itself. What becomes visible is therefore never simply depicted but constituted within the work’s own economy of marks, densities and temporal displacements.

This attention to the instability of pictorial construction also distinguishes the works from contemporary tendencies toward either narrative closure or image circulation. Lăpteanu treats painting less as a medium of representation than as a structure of delay—one in which recognition remains partial and the image retains the capacity to exceed its own legibility.

Sabina Lăpteanu studied at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht and is currently continuing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB).

Text: Tobias Naehring