In her latest works for the solo presentation titled Whispering waters, Isabella Kohlhuber takes us to a place of her childhood: the small river next to her parents’ house where she liked to sit on a stone, and where she decided early on to devote her life to art. Her memories of this environment coincide now with sorrowful thoughts on climate change. Water is the essential medium reflected in these new works, which merge with the artist's fundamental reflections on language and what can be said with words rather what can be shown. All of the works in the exhibition have some collaborative background with her 3-year-old son, who set her focus on aquatic and plants.

Her new image series For the time being combines photographs of plants and bodies of water with associative text elements in Kohlhuber's sign system named „Bastards". The images appear as visual poems, each of which – also through their titles – opens up an associative field about our relations to nature. Especially the themes of water, heat, and drought find representation here, as well as strategies how we could possibly deal (or not deal) with the problems (e.g. run, leave, care). The formats become smaller by 5% each, which also connotes a dwindling of resources. 

The wallpaper Macrophyte was created from a photographic study of an aquatic plant that presents itself as a psychedelic monster through reflection and repetition, similar to a Rorschach test. As a wallpaper, however, the work simultaneously harkens back to earliest forms of murals from the Orient and ancient China, as well as the Biedermeier period. The plant portrayed is neither acutely threatened nor otherwise special – rather, it is commonplace and often viewed with a certain disgust. Here it symbolizes the hope-giving resilience of plants, such as the power to keep bathers away from protected waters.

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