Rinella Alfonso, Leo Arnold, Carla Klein, and Robby Müller: Paintings and Polaroids - A Chair, a Clock, a Shirt, a Car

Annet Gelink Gallery is proud to present Paintings and Polaroids – A Chair, A Clock, A Shirt, A Car, a group exhibition in the gallery’s main space that takes its departure from a group of Polaroids made by Robby Müller in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Through the works of Leo Arnold, Carla Klein, and Rinella Alfonso, the exhibition unfolds into a broader conversation between photography and painting, the instant and the lingering, the real and the reproduction. Müller’s Polaroids speak in the language of immediacy, capturing moments of suspension where natural and artificial light meet. Each image functions both as a document of a specific time and place and as an open space of projection, allowing the viewer’s memory and perception to take root. Scenes of windows, roads, and interiors focus less on narrative than on the act of looking itself, shaped by the subtle passage of light.

Across the gallery, painting becomes both an echo and a counterpoint to Müller’s instant medium. Leo Arnold’s works seem to hold a complete experience in a single glance, yet their painted surfaces reveal time as stretched and layered. Carla Klein’s paintings make the dialogue between photography and painting explicit, using prints and their development marks as the ground to reveal the distance between image and paint. Rinella Alfonso traces the space where the material world meets the symbolic, creating compositions in which chairs, clocks, shirts, and cars carry traces of human presence and memory, rooted in the histories and sensibilities of Curaçao and the Caribbean. Together, the works seem less concerned with depicting reality than with conveying the fleeting sensation of being within it. They linger in suspension, inviting the viewer to inhabit the gaps left by unseen subjects, the passage of time, and light as it is constantly reflected, absorbed, and diffused — moments always caught between what is captured and what escapes.

Opening November 7, 6-8 PM.