Rosa LOY | Verweile doch

Opening within the SpinnereiGalleries anniversary tour

Saturday, May 3, 2025, 11 am–8 pm
Sunday, May 4, 2025, 11 am–6 pm

“Stay a while, you are so beautiful”— these words, drawn from Goethe’s Faust, lend Rosa Loy’s latest solo exhibition its name, and quietly invite us into a moment of stillness. In Verweile Doch, the viewer is asked not simply to look, but to linger, to surrender to an unfolding. The season is spring, but not the obvious one of blossoms and exuberance. This is a more introspective blooming, where time slows, and change stirs beneath the surface. Loy’s world unfolds in layered symbols and whispered rituals, where beauty is both fleeting and enduring.
Rosa Loy’s paintings unfold in a language of gestures, glances, and quiet rituals. Her figures, always women, inhabit intimate landscapes where nature, myth, and memory intermingle. There is no single narrative to follow; instead, we are drawn into a dense, symbolic atmosphere that resists conclusion. Loy’s world is neither fantastical nor realist—it is a realm where the inner life becomes visible, staged with theatrical clarity and painterly softness. Her visual grammar is rooted in the traditions of romanticism and symbolism, yet remains defiantly contemporary in its insistence on ambiguity. In these scenes, femininity is not an object of display but a force: active, relational, and deeply intuitive.
The paintings in Verweile doch are radiant with spring’s quiet insistence, its metaphors of emergence, return, and renewal. Gardening, forestry, and caretaking appear again and again, rendered in bright, translucent layers of casein paint. Female figures tend to the natural world and one another: limbs become leaves, hair merges with soil, fire takes on a human form. In the painting Der Geborgenheit entwunden (Snatched from Security), a gardening woman gently pulls a turnip with a human head from the earth, while in Selbstentblätterung (Self-Defoliation), a red-haired figure calmly removes bright green leaves from her own leafy limbs. These acts are not surreal interruptions, but part of a broader logic of transformation, collaboration, and care.
Recurring motifs—tulips, tree branches, sunbeams—animate this cosmos of soft metamorphosis. Loy’s figures work not alone but in quiet togetherness, their gestures tuned to cycles larger than themselves.
Stay a While is more than a title. It’s an invitation to linger in a space where time bends toward tenderness, where growth unfolds not in bursts but in attentive care. Rosa Loy’s spring is not a spectacle; it is a slow blooming, rich with unseen labor and gentle interdependence. And yet, like the moment in Goethe’s Faust, the beauty offered here is not without unease. It asks us to dwell in what cannot last, to recognize that even joy carries the shadow of its own passing.