Paintings and Polaroids – A Chair, A Clock, A Shirt, A Car | Rinella Alfonso, Leo Arnold, Carla Klein, and Robby Müller

Annet Gelink Gallery cordially invites you to the opening of Paintings and Polaroids – A Chair, A Clock, A Shirt, A Car, a group exhibition in the gallery's main space, on Friday 7 November between 18:00 and 20:00. The exhibition takes as its departure point a series of Polaroids taken by Robby Müller in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Through the work of Leo Arnold, Carla Klein, and Rinella Alfonso, the exhibition unfolds into a broader dialogue between photography and painting, between the immediate and the enduring, between the real and the reproduction.

Robby Müller’s Polaroids speak the language of immediacy — moments of stillness where natural and artificial light converge, images developing right in the artist’s hand. Each photograph is both a document of a specific time and place and a space for projection: open and anonymous, where the viewer’s memory and perception can take root. Images of windows, roads, and interiors suggest not a narrative, but attention — they record not events, but the act of looking itself, shaped by the play of light moving across surfaces and spaces.

Throughout the gallery, painting resonates as both an echo and a counterpoint to Müller’s immediate medium. The works of Leo Arnold seem to encapsulate an entire experience in a single glance, as if painted with the velocity of seeing itself. Yet their painted surfaces reveal time as stretched and layered. Arnold’s images balance between stillness and motion, like a clock perpetually pointing to 11:05 yet perpetually on the verge of turning to the next minute.

In the paintings of Carla Klein, the dialogue between photography and painting becomes explicit. Although photography serves as her starting point, her work originates not from a digital image, but from the print itself — traces of ink, slight processing flaws: they constitute the ground from which her paintings emerge. The result is not a ve