SO AND OTHERWISE brings together artistic positions that do not seek understanding. Each asserts its own view of the world—and claims that it must be seen exactly that way. Not as one possibility among many, not as a cautious suggestion, and not as an invitation to a noncommittal coexistence of different perspectives. Here, art arises from conviction—from the necessity to present the world with a form that, at the moment of its creation, requires no other truth alongside it. Sandra Gutsche, Vera Nowottny, and Sabine Burger could hardly be further apart in their artistic languages. What connects them is precisely not what they have in common. It is the consistency with which each of them follows her own conception of image, reality, and art.

Sandra Gutsche comes from a background in figurative, realistic painting. Her roots remain visible, even where the figure increasingly loses its distinctiveness. Bodies, faces, and spaces come into motion, dissolve, vanish beneath layers of paint, and reappear elsewhere. Her painting becomes freer, wilder, and more uncompromising, without shedding its history. In the depth of her color palette, in the dark, luminous layers, and in the physical presence of the paint, the style of the Old Masters is at times evoked—while simultaneously being hurled into a present in which certainty and clarity no longer hold sway. Gutsche does not abandon the figure. She subjects it to the process of painting.

Vera Nowottny takes a completely different approach. The starting point for her work is photography, particularly the camera obscura—one of the most fundamental principles of image creation. Yet for her, the photographic image is not an end in itself. Light, time, space, and perception become the material for an artistic practice that extends far beyond the classical conception of photography. Her images possess a precise, almost relentless quality of composition and, at the same time, a peculiar depth that eludes quick comprehension. Photographs become objects, intervene in space, leave the wall, and form installations. Images are superimposed, condensed, spread out on the floor, and subjected to new spatial arrangements. Nowottny does not document reality. She compels the photographic image to assert its own reality.

Sabine Burger, on the other hand, relies on the immediate power of painting. Her works emerge from movement, speed, layering, destruction, and re-formation. Color, pigment, charcoal, and line become the vehicles of a process whose outcome cannot be fully controlled—and yet is never arbitrary. Her painting navigates the tension between decision-making and loss of control. Each gesture challenges the next; each stroke may remain or disappear again. Instability here is not a lack of order, but rather productive energy. Burger’s paintings assert themselves through their dynamism. They do not seek to soothe. They capture the moment in which order emerges and is simultaneously threatened once more.

Three female artists. Three ideas of what a picture can be. Three beliefs that do not necessarily have to support one another.

“SO” refers to the consistency with which each of these positions establishes its own reality. In that moment, there is no “maybe.” No relativization. No polite distancing from one’s own convictions. Those who create art make a choice. For an image. For a form. For a stance. For a specific vision of how the world must be seen, experienced, and made visible. OTHERWISE begins where this certainty meets the equally uncompromising certainty of others. Not as a correction. Not as an alternative. And certainly not as reconciliation.
The exhibition forces different truths into the same space. It lets them clash, contradict one another, assert themselves, and challenge one another. No position is tasked with explaining the other. None must adapt to become part of an overarching concept. It is precisely in this that the freedom of this exhibition lies—not in the arbitrariness of accepting everything, but in the challenge of confronting a resolute artistic stance and enduring the fact that, just a few meters away, another stance can assert the exact opposite with equal conviction.

The exhibition presents art as an assertion of reality—and the exhibition space as a place where different truths coexist without losing their sharpness. Three positions are established. A fourth will follow.