Kerstin Brätsch

Ornata House

Opening 18 October 2025

From 18 October 2025, the transformative power of painting will unfold in an unprecedented way at Casa São Roque in Porto.

German artist Kerstin Brätsch will present her most ambitious installation and site-specific exhibition to date, turning the rooms of this eclectic house inside out — like infinitely malleable dreamscapes.

Visitors will embark on a journey through colour and form, videos, painting and drawing, wallpaper and kites — an immersive experience akin to walking through an inner world, a soul surrendered to perpetual abstraction.

But what is abstraction — what, after all, is abstract art in the 21st century? At a time when any screensaver, brushstroke, Rorschach test or colour gradient seems to qualify as abstraction? Nowadays, anything can be abstract painting: the digital, the psychological, a gestural stroke or mere chance.

This is the universe of Kerstin Brätsch’s work. It expands in all directions — beyond the medium, beyond authorship. Brätsch has long embraced collaboration, working with artists such as Adele Röder, Debo Eilers, Ei Arakawa-Nash and craftsmen such as Urs Rickenbach, Dirk Lange and Walter Cipriani.

Her art is collective and singular, simultaneously many voices and one. It is an art of colour and form that both shapes and is shaped by the psyche. Psychedelic yet formal, mirrored yet unrestrained, beautiful and unsettling — it dances like a kite in the wind: diving, emerging, spinning.

Kerstin Brätsch, born in Hamburg in 1979, lives and works in Berlin and New York. She is represented by Gladstone Galleries (New York) and Gió Marconi (Milan). The collective she forms with Debo Eilers, KAYA, is represented by Deborah Schamoni (Munich). Important exhibitions (selection): Moma, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London (as DAS INSTITUT with Adele Röder); Brandhorst Museum, Munich; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Whitney Biennial, New York (as KAYA with Debo Eilers); Luma Foundation in Arles; High Line in New York; 54th and 59th Venice Biennales; Ludwig Forum in Aachen; Munch Museum in Oslo. She recently designed BAUBAU, a children’s space at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, and has an upcoming retrospective exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, scheduled to open in December 2025.

At the opening, on Saturday, 18 October 2025, Conferência Inferno will give a concert at Casa São Roque from 8 to 9 p.m. Everyone is welcome!

Daniel Baumann

Curator of the Exhibition and Casa São Roque