Halle 01, Stand H1/C02, Messe Karlsruhe, Germany

Artists
Giulietta Coates
Rhys Himsworth
Vincent van Gaalen

BBA is delighted to be attending Art Karlsruhe 2025. We will be presenting the work of 3 of our artists: Vincent van Gaalen, Rhys Himsworth, and Giulietta Coates.

Vincent van Gaalen

Dutch photographer Vincent van Gaalen travels to the darkest areas of Europe where nocturnal darkness remains untouched by artificial light pollution. Through his meticulous photography, van Gaalen explores the age-old tension between human creation and the autonomy of nature.

In his ongoing project Absence (started in 2020), van Gaalen ventures into Europe's last truly dark regions to capture a world where humanity is absent. Working alone in these landscapes, lit only by the moon and stars, he photographs the subtle interplay of natural elements like leaves, stones, water, and air. This nocturnal darkness enhances contrasts, transforms outlines, and shifts perception from reason to imagination. The barely visible landscapes become hauntingly tangible, highlighting humanity’s vulnerability amidst nature's enduring autonomy.

Rhys Himsworth

Rhys Himsworth is an artist working at the junction of analogue and digital media. His paintings, prints, sculptures, photographs and multimedia installations attempt to form a discourse around issues of surveillance, authorship, the post natural and geopolitical. His work often utilises redundant electronics and e-waste as a material and medium.

For the last decade he has hacked, appropriated, and shredded and re-assembled various electronic and digital devices to create works and installations that blur the physical and discarnate; documenting a period in history that marks the transition from a temporal orientated experience of the world to an online one.

Giulietta Coates

Coates’ landscape photographs explore the tension between loss and beauty, dread and longing. Her work evokes a nostalgia not for something lost but for what never was, reflecting on the inaccessibility of the grandiose landscapes that surround her. She describes these landscapes as "utterly at a distance," creating a void that feels like a "death space," where connection and intimacy remain forever out of reach.

Through intimate “conversations” with individual motifs—rocks, pools of water, wooden stumps—she crafts allegories for our enigmatic relationship with beauty and nature in the face of mortality. For Coates, beauty itself is a reminder of death’s presence, where the creative impulse intertwines with our impermanence.