Lena Keller – Watching My Own Rotation

68projects is pleased to present Watching My Own Rotation, Lena Keller’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. The artist’s paintings explore the relationship between humans and landscape and are committed to a digital visual aesthetic.

Drawing on the classical genre of landscape painting, Lena Keller’s works revolve around the longing for—and alienation from—natural habitats. Starting from manipulated photographic images, the artist explores questions of human perception and the influence of the digitally shaped environment that surrounds us. Representational imagery combines with seemingly virtual influences to create a pictorial reality of its own.

The curator Larissa Kikol wrote about this:

“It’s these half-awake yet intense moments in the passenger seat when the blurry landscape appears close but out of reach. Sometimes they are childhood memories of innocent, early-morning departures on vacation. But they can also be experiences of deep contemplation, resulting in relaxation and a sense of healing. Rain, snow, heat, or cold—the outside world appears as if through a haze. You only intuit it, perhaps in an ambivalent half-sleep, indulging your thoughts. Moments in which everything merges: the outside, the cold, the sky, the past from which you might be driving away. Lena Keller’s paintings are reminiscent of such moments. They radiate an ambivalence between measured calm and uncertainty.

There is a reason this exhibition text begins with the description of a mood. Lena Keller paints landscapes, and unlike concepts such as ‘nature’ or ‘area,’ landscapes are human constructs that are always associated with a mood. Ludwig Trepl, professor of landscape ecology, summarizes this from a cultural studies perspective: ‘Landscape is […] not the area as it exists independently of the viewer, but the area as it is painted in the viewer’s mind. The landscape does not exist unless someone sees it or imagines it.’

In Lena Keller’s landscape paintings, a melancholic mood drifts across the canvas like a gentle breeze, almost lovingly wiping away any brush marks that might suggest a personal touch. Keller uses computer-manipulated digital images as templates and applies virtual filters to exaggerate colors, heighten contrasts, smooth and flatten details. This references the tools everyone carries in their pockets—Instagram or image-editing apps. Digitally produced by humans, landscape thus becomes a contemporary vocabulary of mood rather than a depiction of nature.

On the canvas, Lena Keller translates the image templates into painting. Some areas remain realistic, while others dissolve into blurriness. The same applies to contours: some remain sharp, while others flare into adjacent color fields. This creates emotional uncertainties. Are we looking at pristine nature—or at nature under threat? Are the trees diseased? Does humanity’s mistreatment of the environment become visible here?

The negation of individual brushwork—the artist’s trace-free painting—opens the landscape directly to the viewer. And yet a certain distance remains. In classical landscape painting, particularly during the Romantic period, the distant horizon over sea or mountains dissolved into blur, resisting analytical understanding and opening a space for fantasy and longing. In Lena Keller’s works, much larger elements of the landscape are out of focus, suggesting a more global distance. Climate change, environmental pollution, and natural disasters replace earlier, more intimate associations.

The viewer stands alone: alone before the outside world, alone in the inability to enter the nature that lies directly before them, and unable to fully comprehend it. When details disappear, it becomes impossible to locate or clearly define the landscape. Lena Keller’s painting is neither illustrative nor didactic; it does not aim to explain or warn directly. Instead, it is complex and subtle. Through blurred motifs, special light, and intense atmosphere, it foregrounds human longing—not for nature in an objective sense, but for a subjective connection with it, for the desire to feel oneself within it. Lena Keller’s paintings contain no people, yet they reveal a great deal about human needs.”

Lena Keller studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 2016 to 2022, where she was a master student of Karin Kneffel. Her works have been shown in exhibitions in Germany and abroad since 2017, most recently at the Museum Fürstenfeldbruck. Works by Lena Keller are included in collections such as the German Bundestag in Berlin and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munich.