Rudolf-Scharpf-Galerie
Valentina Jaffé - Dripping Folds and Melting States

31/01/2026 – 26/04/2026

The Rudolf Scharpf Gallery of the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum opens its new annual program with the most extensive institutional solo exhibition to date by the artist Valentina Jaffé. Under the title Dripping Folds and Melting States, the artist unfolds a multilayered world of painting, ceramics, and spatial installation - a constellation of color, material, light, and movement. Jaffé’s works are characterized by intersections, overlays, and the exploration of in-between states - a play between change and continuity. Her paintings on long-fibered paper integrate themselves into the space like breathing membranes, altering their perception through light and movement. Through manifold superimpositions, the works create an immersive spatial experience across the gallery’s three floors. A central element of the exhibition is Jaffé’s ceramics. Delicate as a breath, organic and static at once, they play with opposites such as hardness and softness, fragility and resistance, cold and warmth. In a new photographic series, created in collaboration with performance artist Vivian Schöchlin, boundaries between ceramic sculpture and body begin to blur, opening questions of touch, closeness, and vulnerability. The exhibition invites visitors to discover Jaffé’s intensive engagement with material, space, and body, and to experience the subtle transitions between surface, three-dimensionality, transparency, and density. 

Accompanying the exhibition, the publication Dripping Folds and Melting States appears with DCV Books. Positioned between artist’s book and catalogue, it is expanded through contributions by Carolin Heel and Fedra Benoli.

Curator: Fedra Benoli