Die Dinge singen hör ich so gern • Renate Balda: *sehenswert Sonia Costantini

“I love to hear things sing,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke—a poetic key to understanding Renate Balda's artistic work. Her pieces are not about staging, but about revealing the essential. Matter behaves as it must according to its nature, and it is precisely this inner law that Balda gives space to in her creative process.

She sees herself less as a designer than as a companion: color, form, and material are allowed to unfold without instrumentalizing intervention. It is a balancing act between conscious restraint and subtle guidance, between intuition and trust in the “laws of necessity” (Yanagi Soetsu) inherent in the process.

The result is gold-edged works, monochrome paintings, and ceramics that have a quiet presence. Their beauty “does not want to have an effect, but to be”—as John Cage describes it, it is about the “presentational character” of art: color for its own sake, sound for its own sake.

The exhibition provides a concentrated insight into the work of Renate Balda and invites visitors to listen to the language of the materials.

As a guest artist in the *sehenswert format, Renate Balda presents the Italian painter Sonia Costantini, with whom she has been closely connected in artistic friendship for over 20 years. Costantini's monochrome works reveal a similar attitude toward color—a deep concentration on its pure presence and effect.