Image: Kutlesa, Goldau
Kutlesa has announced ‘What’s Lost in the Dance’, an exhibition of new works by London-based artist Rachel Barlow at the gallery’s Switzerland location. The exhibition marks Barlow’s first solo show with Kutlesa since she joined its roster and her first show in Switzerland. It will run from October 23 through December 18, 2026.
For Barlow, painting is a way to explore the passing of time through material and physical existence. Her paintbrush moves across the canvas with the rhythm of a dance, cycling through beats, repetitions and interruptions; dance provides a point of departure as gesture and movement become intertwined with the act of making.
At the centre of the exhibition is a triptych of large-scale pieces that originated as a single multi-panel painting. Through the process of creation, the painting emerged as three real and distinct works that form an impossible repetition of Pleasure, Death and Reality. Although they exist on separate philosophical planes, the physical intensity of their making and their formal compositional relationships remain visible.
The exhibition includes ‘The ympe-tre’ (2026), a painting inspired by the medieval romance ‘Sir Orfeo’. The work marks the threshold between the fae and human worlds and explores the ympe-tre as a space of transition between the real and unreal.
The title binding the works together acts partly as a question and partly as a statement about what is created through dance, gesture and living, summoning everything that has been lost in the process. The exhibition frames the passing of one moment to the next through a minute shift in the planet’s orientation, the falling of a leaf from a tree and the turn of a body moving through space.
