THREADS OF GOLD
ABOUT THE GROUP EXHIBITION
EXHIBITION
20.11.2025 - 17.01.2026
OPENING HOURS
TUESDAY - SATURDAY
12:00 - 18:00
LOCATION
BBA GALLERY
KÖPENICKER STR. 96
10179 BERLIN
OPENING RECEPTION
THURSDAY 20. NOVEMBER
18:00 - 21:00
PERFORMANCE BY
Ampelos Collective
20.11.
Gold — a material, a metaphor, and a mystery — has long held a unique and magnetic place in the human imagination, symbolising wealth, power, divinity, and eternity. Used across centuries and cultures, from sacred iconography to imperial regalia, and from the alchemy of transformation to the Japanese art of kintsugi repair, gold has always carried a weight beyond its monetary value. Presented by BBA Gallery, this exhibition, 'Threads of Gold', explores this material not merely as adornment but as a conscious artistic choice — a potent decision made to highlight, to question, to honour, or to protect.
The artists gathered here use gold as an expressive medium, allowing it to become a language, a gesture, a form of resistance, and a revelation. Whether applied as a delicate wash, embedded deep within a structure, or engaged with purely conceptually, gold in this context is never neutral; it directs the viewer's gaze toward what truly matters: personally, politically, and spiritually. Some works choose to gild the overlooked, drawing attention to forgotten objects or marginalised narratives, while others expose and challenge what is conventionally deemed valuable. The approach is multifaceted, engaging with gold’s roles as a carrier of value (spiritual or economic), a link to rich artistic traditions, and a cutting commentary on contemporary issues of desire, wealth, or decay.
'Threads of Gold' brings together diverse voices and disciplines to reflect on this enduring material’s profound and often contradictory significances. This collection explores gold as a powerful symbol, surface, or structure, challenging us to consider what it hides, what it reveals, what it promises — and what it truly costs. The exhibition ultimately honours the precious, the decorative, and the meaningful, compelling us to ask: What do we emphasise with gold? And why?
FEATURED ARTWORKS
FEATURED ARTISTS
The question arises: Why gold? Over the course of a year, Verena Bachl collected 500 insects, each of which was covered with gold. This gilding process transforms the overlooked into something precious, creating a monument to the past of biodiversity and its alarming extinction. Through this work, which is both poetic and unsettling, Bachl invites us to confront the silent reality of mass extinction — a crisis that largely remains unnoticed and ignored. By covering the insects with gold, she makes their true value within our ecosystem visible while simultaneously confronting us with our tendency to overlook them.
Despite its aesthetic beauty, the work is also intended to encourage reflection. It poses the questions: Why must something be gilded to be appreciated? What have we already sacrificed in the name of progress?
Traditionally, gold leaf in Orthodox iconography represents the immediate presence of the Divine. In The Artist's Hands, I use it to emphasize the alchemy of artistic labor. Artists take ordinary materials — paint, metal, wood — and transform them into works of art whose value far exceeds that of their basic components. The gold symbolizes this added value: the intellectual precision, emotional depth, and sheer beauty that we infuse into every piece. It stands for the meaning-making element that elevates matter, affirming the creative process as a profoundly powerful, almost divine act.
Giulietta Coates, in her works for "Threads of Gold," uses the material gold to evoke a sense of awe and ethereality, directly connecting the rapidly disappearing icons of travel and natural landscapes with the sacred. Just as gold historically symbolizes the Divine and a heavenly "no-man's-land" in the iconography of deceased saints, Coates uses it to imbue the vanishing elements of tourism — such as disappearing glaciers, mountains, nature parks, and islands — with a precious, almost untouchable value. This conscious choice highlights the impending decline of free travel and the loss of these natural wonders. The artworks are thus simultaneously an allusion to past journeys and a reflection on their irretrievable loss, underscoring their profound preciousness and the need for reverence.
Little Fighters documents the intensive life of young elite female gymnasts in Copenhagen who train up to 20 hours a week to compete at an international level. Gymnastics is primarily a battle with oneself — with fears, doubts, and pain. However, the girls support each other, transforming a lonely struggle into a communal one: side by side, limits are overcome.
The gold medal they strive for is far more than a sporting prize. It stands for excellence, perseverance, and the conquering of personal limits. Like the precious metal itself, it symbolizes value, permanence, and preciousness, making it visible that every victory is based on years of dedication, discipline, and mutual support. In Little Fighters, the medal becomes a sign of personal triumph, team spirit, and the beauty of the relentless pursuit of perfection.
In the artworks of Katarina Kudelova, the material gold functions in two distinct yet interconnected symbolic registers: as a gesture of healing care and as a symbol of unyielding power.
In Threads of Gold, gold is used as a metaphorical Kintsugi, a Japanese repair technique, to highlight the wounds of animals caught in barbed wire. By covering the lacerations with gold, Kudelova's work acknowledges the "misconduct" of the human-animal conflict and supremacy. The precious metal symbolises the longing for harmony and a caring hand despite the cruelty.
Conversely, in the wall installation Feast, gold signifies absolute power and divinity. The golden predator, enthroned on the remnants of its subjects, uses gold to demonstrate its awe-inspiring authority and strength. Here, the metal embodies the cold, undeniable nature of prey and dominion, creating a tension between its inherent beauty.
"I am drawn to the flow of movement and transience. I find meaning in things that never settle, in this constant state of change. I don't plan. I enter the studio and allow my awareness and my emotions to surface. Then I begin to work. I lay the canvas on the floor and move around it — in a circle, leaning forward, stepping back,..."
In his works, gold appears not as a symbol of wealth, but as a living color — as flowing light that makes movement visible and reflects change. It serves as the color of transition — between light and matter, the visible and the invisible. Gold is never static; it changes with every glance. Its sheen and its fragility reveal the movement and transience that form the core of his work.
Tim Bengel uses gold in his works to charge them with cultural and symbolic significance. For him, gold is not just a material, but a carrier of wealth, power, and value, which takes up historical associations while simultaneously commenting on current social phenomena. Through the targeted use of gold, Bengel creates contrasts between transience and permanence, between the mundane and luxury, and invites the viewer to reflect on consumption, status, and the spirit of the age.
Clément Claudius, bridging environmental biology and art, employs gold as a potent medium to interrogate themes of loss, value, and transience. He uses gold leaf to coat a real butterfly before setting it ablaze, a shocking "expensive loss" symbolising the irreversible ecological damage of climate change. Documented photographically, this act transforms a fleeting life into a permanent critique.
Conversely, his "Golden Ride" series uses gold spray paint to elevate abandoned street scooters . This performative transformation turns urban trash into temporary, fascinating sculptures, forcing a public reassessment of waste and the ephemeral nature of value. Gold acts as a brilliant, deceptive veneer, drawing the eye to things we overlook or destroy.
Jahna Dahms's work treats industrial packaging as archaeological artifacts of the present. The artist collects and recontextualises these ubiquitous forms, which are preserved entirely unchanged in shape. This approach reveals their formal kinship with ancient golden objects, positioning them within an art-historical framework.
The aesthetic operation is centered on gilding. Each piece is transformed using a meticulous oil-gilding technique with 24-karat gold leaf, creating a closed, seamless surface. The gold is a deliberate choice; it establishes a connection to historical traditions, making the continuity of form across epochs legible. By elevating the detritus of mass consumption with a material signifying lasting value, Dahms compels a re-evaluation of the essential structures that define our consumer culture.
In her project 'My Bohemia,' Renata Kudlacek personally addresses the themes of identity, memory, and home. In multi-layered collages, she interweaves iconic features and the rich history of Prague with her personal mythology and family archives.
In its latest development, the project bridges Renata Kudlacek's birthplace, Prague, with her new home and source of inspiration, Berlin. A central element that connects these two worlds and defines this phase is gold.
The use of gold is a direct homage to Prague's moniker, the 'Golden City' (Zlaté město). It recalls the gilded spires of Prague Castle and captures the warm, golden shimmer of the sandstone that illuminates the city at sunset. However, in Renata Kudlacek's work, the symbolism of gold extends far beyond this. It is the luminous thread that connects the past and the present, symbolising the imperishable value of home — those roots that do not fade even from a distance.
Gold sanctifies the fragments of her history, bestowing upon memories the status of precious relics. Simultaneously, it acts as an alchemical element of transformation: the merging of the golden memories of Prague with the pulsating energy of Berlin into a new, unique identity. Thus, 'My Bohemia' becomes a visual narrative of the artistic journey — a personal mythology created from the radiant fragments of two cities.
In his work, Luca Ortis utilises gold as a connecting element to unite two separate prints. This technique is reminiscent of the Japanese craft of Kintsugi, where broken ceramics are repaired with gold, ensuring that the fractures are not concealed but emphasised.
This practice conveys the philosophy that beauty lies in imperfection and in the process of healing. This technique not only creates visual unity but also symbolises the merging of memory and imagination.
The gold functions as a bridge between the physical world of the prints and the immaterial world of thoughts and emotions.
Nicolas Vionnet employs gold not as a symbol of mere opulence, but as a charged, malleable material that leverages its cultural history to reflect on fragility, vulnerability, and the tension between the sacred and the profane. In his work, gold consistently functions as a catalyst for irony — it forces a confrontation between its ancient meanings of permanence and divinity and its current reality as a transient, distorted, or subverted medium.
Vionnet utilises the material's cultural significance to make central contemporary tensions visible in his works. In Changeover, he undermines the material’s economic prestige by choosing a gold-coloured emergency blanket, thus transforming the colour of wealth into a symbol of extreme human vulnerability — that of the chilled refugee. This contrasts the supposed permanence of gold with the fleeting, life-threatening danger of the sea.
He proceeds similarly in Holy Water: the religious gold of a monumental crucifix elevates the sacred, only to simultaneously subvert it through the profane reality of a dripping tap — a bitter satire on human ageing and incontinence. The golden surface thus draws even greater attention to the ultimately undignified vulnerability of the body.