Traces Remain Alistair Gow, Birgit Klerch, Esther Schnerr

What do we leave behind — in landscapes, in memory, in matter?

In Traces Remain, the works of Alistair Gow, Birgit Klerch, and Esther Schnerr meet across quiet distances. Each artist, in their own way, maps the spaces where presence fades and memory settles — where human impact becomes echo, and the line between nature and narrative begins to blur. Together, their practices speak not through declaration, but through the careful accumulation of detail, surface, and mood. These are not loud works, but enduring ones. Each image holds something back — a trace, a mark, a subtle erosion of what once was.

Alistair Gow’s print-based works carry the delicate translucency of watercolour, yet emerge through slow, hands-on processes. Monotypes and layered impressions offer fragments of figures, interiors, and fleeting gestures, rendered with just enough clarity to pull us in — and just enough ambiguity to keep us suspended. His images feel ungraspable, like memories returning in half-light: a room you once entered, a figure you almost recognised. There’s a quiet intimacy in these prints, shaped not just by what is shown, but by the spaces between things — the silence around the trace.

Birgit Klerch works in a language of dissolution. Her paintings — grounded in her years between Basel, Stockholm, and Hamburg — unfold from personal topographies, drawing on lived rooms, emotional weather, and the blurred boundaries of recollection. Surfaces are scraped, layered, washed out. Details appear only to disappear again. A curtain, a wall, a field at dusk — all rendered with equal care and instability. In her recent works, Klerch turns toward the classical motif of landscape, yet what she finds there is no longer untouched. The horizon becomes a place of tension, where beauty strains under the weight of presence, and every view carries the mark of human alteration. Her paintings do not offer answers. They hold space for reflection, for stillness, for the slow unraveling of the idyllic.

Esther Schnerr brings a different kind of depth — one that stretches across geological time. Her work, grounded in drawing, watercolour, and textile, is meticulous, layered, and filled with quiet wonder. Trained in classical painting and shaped by an early career in finance, Schnerr’s practice carries both precision and introspection. Fossils, imagined marine life, extinct forms, and cellular structures emerge from her compositions with delicate intensity. In series such as Human Remains and Cambrian Sea, the human is both actor and witness — the cause and the afterthought. Her works are less about catastrophe than about continuity: what we touch, what we change, and what remains after us. Even the materials she uses — the softness of thread, the vulnerability of paper — reinforce her themes: that all things are part of a fragile, interwoven ecology.

What connects these three practices is not style or subject, but a shared attention to the act of seeing — and the quiet weight of what is left behind. Their works ask us to look again, more slowly. To notice the way a form dissolves into pigment. To follow the outline of a creature whose name we may not know. To sit in the stillness of a painted room that feels somehow familiar.