In Mystery, Worlds Collide
La Bibi + Reus
Karolina Albricht
September - November 2025
“We must learn to speak with mystery, otherwise we will never say anything.”
— Hélène Cixous [1]
When two worlds collide, they cease to exist in their individuality. What once seemed solid reveals itself as illusory. The veil is lifted, and what emerges is something else: an imperfect, unpredictable mixture. The same happens in encounters with people, with experiences. Something transforms us and, mysteriously, we never return to being exactly the same.
In this sense, one could say that encountering a painting by Karolina Albricht is also a transformative experience. On her surfaces—whether canvas or wood—different worlds intertwine and reorganize, posing questions about form and its possible dissolution. What happens when we lose our own contours? Beyond the pictorial surface another collision occurs: that of the painting with the gaze that contemplates it. The distance between them does not separate but rather situates us on a threshold—like a silent yet insistent invitation.
In Mystery, Worlds Collide is her first solo exhibition in Spain. One could say it begins with a residency, during which the surrounding landscape had a profound impact on the artist’s working process. As Albricht recalls:
“What I keep returning to when thinking about the residency are the views and the light in the studio. Every day, I would wake to incredible visual potential, just beyond the windows of the house: the shimmer of grass, the tremor of foliage on the trees in the foreground, the distant outline of the mountain range, and its meeting point with the sky. Light, colour, movement, temperature, sound — all would shift each day. When working, I would open the windows, even on a chilly day, so I could hear the world. The view was never the same — it never felt the same — it seemed inexhaustible. Somehow, it reminded me of my favourite spot on the River Lee in London, where I often stop on the way to my studio. Even if only for a minute, it’s always enough to ground me, to remind me of the boundlessness of the natural world.” [2]
The encounter of different worlds also manifests here: the views from the residency and those along the way to her London studio. In both cases, nature reveals itself as a boundless presence, opening a reflective parenthesis. All of this becomes visible, in one way or another, in the paintings. From Illuminating But Dividing Within, a small vibrant canvas that opens the exhibition, to the homonymous diptych at its center, the works seem to waver between preserving their own contours or dissolving entirely into something larger, difficult to name. In this tension lies the very experience of existence. The installation Lofty Branches Would Spread Here and There reflects, perhaps more than any other work in Karolina’s trajectory, this controlled tendency toward dispersion, growing like an organic being that spreads across the gallery walls.
Painting here does not present itself as a window or a portal, but as what unfolds beyond its surface. The influence of Polish painter Jerzy Nowosielski resonates in this search. He understood art as a means of reaching realities beyond the visible, and in Albricht’s work there pulses that same spiritual dimension, where the fragmented and the multiple become pathways toward other forms of perception.
Mystery is, in this sense, an indispensable condition. It is not a theme but something that takes place in the very act of looking—in that instant when the work and the viewer begin to lose their contours. The encounter may be brief, but it leaves an indelible trace. Karolina Albricht invites us to inhabit that space of collision and communion, where worlds meet and are transformed into something essentially different and, perhaps, more mysterious.
[1] Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 21.
[2] Karolina Albricht, unpublished notes, 2025.