Artists: Steffen Kern - Jonah Gebka

Stories at Room Temperature brings together Munich-based artists Steffen Kern and Jonah Gebka in an exhibition that explores images in a state of suspension - where narratives are not fully formed, but held in latency.

There are images that belong neither to memory no projection, but to an intermediate state-a stable, almost imperceptible mental temperature where reality settles quietly. Stories at Room Temperature unfolds within this space of latency: one in which narratives are not told, but held in suspension.

Bringing together Munich-based artists Steffen Kern and Jonah Gebka, the exhibition sets into tension two distinct yet porous image regimes: on one side, drawing as the condensation of interior, filtered, almost residual images; on the other, painting as a framing device for the external world.

Steffen Kern develops a highly precise drawing practice using colored pencils on paper, where the slowness of execution contrasts with the intensity of the resulting images. His scenes, anonymous interiors, deserted architectures, isolated objects, or recurring motifs such as fire-appear as fragments extracted from an interrupted narrative flow. They evoke films that were never made, or memories reduced to their remaining light.

Where the image is reduced to its minimal threshold, it does not disappear; instead, it is held in suspension. Kern’s drawings operate within an economy of narrative close to cinematic ellipsis, or to the “empty scene” associated with Antonioni. Fire, in particular, appears not as spectacle, but as a contained presence-an image of suspended, nearly silent energy.

In counterpoint, Jonah Gebka’s paintings, executed in acrylic and vinyl on canvas, construct layered spaces where interior and exterior, memory and projection overlap. Windows, frames, and intermediary surfaces play a structuring role, emphasizing the mediated nature of vision. His scenes – suburban landscapes, architectural settings, interiors - oscillate between familiarity and dislocation, producing an instability that resists any singular reading. Here, the image functions less as representation than as an active construction of perception.

In Gebka’s work, planes overlap, temporalities blur, and the image unfolds through a logic of montage. Where Kern operates through reduction, Gebka works through proliferation; in both cases, the image escapes resolution. The exhibition title, Stories at Room Temperature, serves as a conceptual key: it does not propose storytelling, but the conditions under which stories persist. At room temperature, affects are neither intensified nor dissipated-they remain. The images, too, occupy this intermediate state: neither fully fixed nor fully narrative.

What connects the two artists, despite their distinct practices, is an attention to the contemporary circulation of images-between memory, fiction, and a saturated visual environment. Both work from a diffuse visual culture in which cinema, architecture, and everyday imageryre combine into quiet, self-contained surfaces.

The exhibition thus proposes a slowed mode of viewing, almost meditative, in which each work functions as a perceptual threshold. Not an accumulation of images, but a sequence of visual situations to inhabit. In a world defined by the speed and overheating of images, Stories at Room Temperature opens a space in which narratives settle, stabilize, and, paradoxically, become more persistent.