La jetée

LA JETÉE

Filip Henin, Øyvind Sørfjordmo, Jan Zöller

1 – 22 August 2026

Robert Grunenberg is pleased to present La Jetée, a group exhibition that brings together three painterly positions centered around a single suspended moment: the instant right before or right after something changes.

Named after Chris Marker's film La Jetée, which is composed almost entirely of photographs, the exhibition circles around the power of a single image that etches itself indelibly into memory. From three different perspectives, the works hold open a single moment. Just before the turn. In the middle of the transition. And in what remains afterward. Never letting itself settle on one definitive image.

Filip Henin's figures hold this stillness. A boy sits in a garden. A swimmer is folded into a wave. A boxer remains motionless before a field of vivid color. None of these figures are in motion. All are caught in a calm that feels like the aftermath of something already happened, or like the held breath just before it.

Øyvind Sørfjordmo paints the moment itself. His canvases emerge from black, fragmented structural lines that organise sharp-edged fields of color before dissolving again. Stars return again and again, white and radiant, somewhere between cosmic sign and controlled explosion. Botanical forms surface from the fractures in the grid, as if pushing their way through its order.

Jan Zöller turns his attention to the moment when something passes between people. A sparkling candle is lit, held, and passed on. Its glow connects two hands for an instant — not as a study of light itself, but as a metaphor for a shared beginning, for energy moving from one person to the next. Across a mid-sized canvas and two framed works on paper, the same gesture returns again and again, slightly altered each time. The spark, the smoke, and the afterimage of the light overlap into a single image — less a point of origin than a shared moment.