Locus Affectus: Lara Ögel
Galerist is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of Lara Ögel at the gallery, titled Locus Affectus, on view from April 27 to June 13, 2026. In Latin, locus affectus names the place where feeling takes hold—the site, within the body or within space, where something is sensed, stirred, and transformed. It is a term that belongs equally to medicine, philosophy, poetry, and to the intimate knowledge of a body that has learned to read itself from within. Ögel’s exhibition takes up this dual sense: the body as locus, feeling as the force that both situates and transforms us.
Bringing together ceramic sculptures, watercolour works bearing the marks of a now absent layer, and an ongoing body of book covers, the exhibition traces a single, sustained question: what remains when, layer by layer, everything you thought held you together is stripped away? Clay is Ögel’s central medium and primary interlocutor. Rather than representing thought, it embodies it—responding, through form, surface, and the resistance of matter, to what language cannot resolve, and what can only be approached through material passage. The works are marked by blurred boundaries: bodies that bleed into one another, that open and close at once, that fragment and accumulate. Clay, thrown to the floor, opens its mouth. Tulle, laid against watercolour, produces correspondences it was never asked to calculate.
At the centre of the exhibition is the act of shedding, not as loss but as archive. Each layer that separates carries its own testimony; what is peeled away is also preserved. Ögel’s works ask what a body holds, and in what measure, before it must let go. Yet the body is not only conceived as a form that accumulates or dissolves, but also as a threshold where symbolic and ritual intensities, states of belief and surrender, become materially perceptible. For this reason, openings, fissures, and permeable surfaces emerge not as signs of lack, but as the very conditions through which light, contact, and meaning enter. This tension between gravity and grace, borrowed from Simone Weil, runs through the exhibition as both structural logic and quiet devotional force: what we surrender to weight, and what we allow to rise.
Locus Affectus grows from a sustained inquiry into duality, return, and what it means to carry more than one version of oneself. The works inherit this inquiry without illustrating it. Forms are multiple yet coherent: the same mark repeated, layered, altered, and still recognisable. The exhibition holds these plural states within a single, generous space, and asks where, within that accumulation, feeling ultimately settles.
