Dear Reality: ASMA, Jose Bonell, Michele Cesaratto, Veronika Hilger, Isaac Lythgoe, Isabel Nuño de Buen

Opening Thursday, July 3, 6–9 pm

In a time when long-held certainties are wavering, when the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and simulation are increasingly blurred, Dear Reality explores the fluid, ambiguous realms that exist beyond the tangible. What once seemed unimaginable has become fact, and things we once considered absolute reveal themselves to be unstable. In this shifting landscape, uncertainty is not merely a condition but a state of being – an openness to multiple perspectives, unresolved tensions, and the dissolution of clear distinctions.

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Dear Reality, I was born into you. You were the container, the scaffolding of everything. You were given, not chosen. You were the world I found myself in – concrete, comforting, the dull hum of continuity. ‘Dasein’, just being there, not of our making, not to be questioned. Yet something began to shift, slowly, at first, like fog at the edges of a field. You loosened your grip, you began to erode – not vanish, but melt. The world, once firm, became soft, then shapeless. Sound turned to noise, structure to spectacle.

Dear Reality, I thought you were mine. I thought I could hold you like the memories of a summer day in childhood, the nostalgia for another time. I thought I could shape you, write the rules, name your gods. But dreams are brittle. You are everybody’s playground, yet nobody’s game. The angry man shouts at you, furious at your refusal to obey. Where once there was ‘Heimat’ there is now a ‘Heimatministerium’. Ideology replaced belonging. We administrate what we can no longer feel.

Dear Reality, we no longer yearn for certainty and order. You are not made out of solid ground but out of water. You are not what we make, but what emerges between us. You are no longer a place to stand, but a movement to meet. You have become elastic. You bend toward chaos. And we find ourselves shaped by forces we can no longer trace.

Dear Reality, to do nothing is to let you fall into decay. To act is to care. You are not ours to define, but we are yours to respond to. In this ever-turning world, uncertainty is not a flaw to fix, but the very air we breathe – a fertile haze of possibility, where many truths flicker, where tensions remain unresolved, and the borders between things soften, blur, and fade.

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ASMA is the artist duo of Matias Armendaris (b. 1990, Ecuador) and Hanya Beliá (b. 1994, Mexico), based in Mexico City. Their collaborative practice combines allegorical figures with evocative architectural spaces, investigating the interplay between painting and sculpture. Through fictional narratives that merge natural forms with psychoaffective landscapes, they create hybrid, materially and conceptually ‘polluted’ works. Their approach reflects a metamodern sensibility – oscillating between critical explorations of identity and belonging, and ornate, nostalgic aesthetics.
ASMA has exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (US), SculptureCenter (New York), Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), and Denver Art Museum (US). Solo and group exhibitions include House of Gaga (Los Angeles), Deli Gallery (New York), PEANA (Mexico City & Monterrey), Everyday Gallery (Antwerp), Project Pangeé (Montreal), Embajada (San Juan), Make Room (Los Angeles), and Manifesta 13 (Marseille), among others.

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Jose Bonell is a painter known for his subtle depiction of fragmented details. His work draws on collective imagination, blending historical, literary, and personal references. Whether dreamlike, ironic, or humorous, his paintings depict characters engaged in bizarre or surreal acts. Using fluid brushstrokes and atmospheric colors, Bonell creates tragi-comic images that explore time, space, and the human condition. His paintings serve as visual allegories of existence, forming a metaphor-rich mythological universe reflecting our own world.
Born in Barcelona in 1989, Bonell has exhibited internationally, including at Adams and Ollman (Portland), Various Small Fires (Los Angeles), Semiose (Paris), White Columns, and The Hole (New York). He received the Prix Novembre in Vitry-sur-Seine, France, in 2020. Alongside Sara Bonache, he co-directs Unica Edicions, a publisher of limited-edition artist books and objects.

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Michele Cesaratto’s painting draws on the artistic legacies of Florence and Venice, where he studied, and echoes the spirit of early Italian masters like Fra Angelico, Pisanello, and Gentile da Fabriano. His work shares their delicate attention to nature and a sense of expressive naivety – refined yet emotionally direct. Alongside these influences, Cesaratto has long been inspired by Chinese landscape painting, particularly its meditative, almost spiritual relationship with nature. His works sit at the intersection of these two worlds, inviting quiet contemplation – like a Renaissance devotional panel or a painted silk scroll.
Born in 1998 in San Daniele del Friuli, northern Italy, Cesaratto first earned a degree from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze (2021) and then at the Accademia di Belle Arti Venezia (2024). Recent solo and group exhibitions include Pingendo and Piangendo at Acappella (Naples), L’Oracolo at Spazio Murka (Florence), Le Divisament dou Monde: disegni italiani sull’Estremo Oriente at China Academy of Art (Hangzhou), and Haunted Garden at The Artist Room (London).

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Veronika Hilger’s paintings inhabit a space between genres, styles, and abstraction. Classical subjects – interiors, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits – blend into biomorphic worlds that reflect on human relationships with nature and each other. Hilger is drawn to ambiguity and transition, exploring the nature of painting through spontaneous yet deliberate layering and transformation of form. Alongside painting, she works sculpturally with ceramics. Some pieces echo her paintings in their sensitivity and technique, while others, more figurative, highlight form and symbolic meaning.
Born in 1981 in Prien am Chiemsee, Hilger studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. In 2025, she received the Lothar Fischer Prize and will have a solo show at the Lothar Fischer Museum in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz in 2026. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include In Between at Andrew Reed Gallery (New York), Confab Window at Hatch (Paris), Perpetual Dawn at Sperling (Munich), breeding shapes at Kunstpavillon (Munich), and Seltene Erden at Kunstverein Recklinghausen. Group exhibitions include Carrying the Earth to the Sky, Various Others (Munich), Three of a Kind at Kogo Gallery (Tartu), WERK.STOFF Preis für Malerei, Kunstverein Heidelberg, 50 Jahre – Bilder einer Sammlung at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, and another gesture, A.I.R. gallery (New York).

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Isaac Lythgoe explores the impact of emerging technologies on future social structures through a narrative-driven, multidisciplinary practice. Drawing from storytelling traditions, his work weaves together themes of ethics, romance, and mortality as shifting frameworks for investigating the intersection of synthetic and biological systems – seen as key agents of transformation in the human experience. His pieces often manifest as hybrid compositions, combining symbolic organic materials with new media, where the handmade and the digital coexist in constant flux.
Lythgoe was born in 1989 on the British island of Guernsey and is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London. Recent exhibitions include After Laughter Comes Tears at MUDAM (Luxembourg), Cute! at Somerset House (London), On the Edge of All This Sprawl of Night and Cities at Super Dakota (Brussels), Sentient Beings Living Worthwhile Lives at Galeria Duarte Sequeira (Braga), and solo presentations at Frieze (London) and Liste Art Fair Basel. His work has also been shown at the National Portrait Gallery (London), FRAC Corsica, Seventeen Gallery (London), and Exo Exo (Paris). Recent residencies include Lafayette Anticipations Paris and Fondation Fiminco (Paris).

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Isabel Nuño de Buen’s (b. 1985 in Mexico-City) work is ambitious not only in scale but, more importantly, in scope. Combining sculpture, drawing, and installation, she creates allegorical portraits that explore both the self and human civilization as ongoing, complex, and unfinished projects. Her practice is inherently fragmented, marked by a sense of open-endedness that points toward a much larger, ever-changing, and ultimately unknowable whole. Her pieces feel like puzzles that, if fully unraveled, would not reveal clear answers but instead erase their own mysteries. This tension – their semi-mysterious promise of meaning – serves as an allegory for both individual identity and civilization itself. Rather than being literal or didactic, her work exists on the edge of understanding, much like ancient civilizations or our own complete selves: close enough to glimpse but always just beyond full comprehension.
Recent solo exhibitions include Garden of Time, Mai 36 (Zurich), Now and Away, Chris Sharp Gallery (Los Angeles), Isabel Nuño de Buen – SPRENGEL PREIS, Sprengel Museum (Hannover), In another time and space, Lulu (Mexico City), and in fugue, Kunstverein Hannover. Recent group exhibitions include The Blinding Light, slash art (San Francisco), Companions of the Sun, Station (Berlin), and Distant Voices, Stereo (Warsaw).