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171 GALLERY is pleased to welcome Christina Gähler to its gallery program.

Born in Switzerland in 1988, Gähler has developed a distinctive painting practice that moves between figuration and abstraction. Her enigmatic pictorial worlds bring together psychological states, personal experience, memory, and reflections on contemporary society, creating images that feel at once familiar and elusive.

At the core of Gähler’s practice is an exploration of the relationship between the recognizable and the indeterminate. Figures, gestures, vegetation, landscapes, and fragments of everyday life emerge from atmospheric fields of color, only to shift, dissolve, or recede again. Human figures often inhabit these environments in moments of isolation, suspension, or uncertainty. Their presence suggests narratives and relationships, yet the wider context remains deliberately open. What initially appears recognizable can quickly become ambiguous, allowing different readings to emerge within the same image.

Gähler’s imagery moves fluidly between inner and outer realities. Personal memories, psychological states, places, encounters, and lived experiences intersect with broader questions surrounding vulnerability, instability, and the conditions of contemporary life. Her paintings acknowledge how the world around us leaves traces within us, and how these traces can reappear in altered forms through memory and perception.

Rather than illustrating specific events or constructing linear narratives, Gähler allows these impressions to surface indirectly. Everyday situations can shift toward the uncanny, while familiar environments acquire an almost dreamlike distance. Individual elements appear charged with possible meaning without being reduced to symbols with fixed interpretations. The resulting images create spaces of projection in which memory, unease, intimacy, vulnerability, and imagination can coexist.

This ambiguity is closely connected to Gähler’s approach to the medium itself. Her paintings develop through a continuous negotiation between intuition and deliberate intervention. Color is layered, reworked, removed, revealed, and condensed. Figurative passages coexist with areas in which gesture, surface, and painterly materiality take precedence over representation. Forms emerge and disappear, spatial relationships remain unstable, and the boundaries between figure and ground are continuously renegotiated.

The image is therefore not entirely determined in advance. It develops through the act of painting, allowing unexpected relationships and associations to emerge throughout the process. Images and experiences accumulated over time become part of an internal reservoir that can resurface without being consciously summoned. In this sense, Gähler’s process reflects the mechanisms of memory itself, where fragments of the past return, transform, overlap with the present, or gradually lose their original contours.

Painting becomes, for Gähler, more than a means of depicting a scene. It is a space in which perception and meaning are continually constructed and destabilized. The tension between what can be identified and what remains unresolved gives her work its particular psychological intensity. Rather than providing answers, the paintings invite the viewer to remain within this uncertainty and to bring their own memories, associations, and experiences into the encounter with the image.

Gähler studied Fine Arts at the F&F School of Art and Media Design in Zurich before completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master in Contemporary Arts Practice at the Bern University of the Arts. Alongside her artistic education, she trained as a qualified activation specialist in the field of healthcare. She was awarded a work grant by the Aargauer Kuratorium in recognition of the quality and distinctive character of her artistic practice and her accomplished use of painterly means to open complex spaces of interpretation.

Her first solo exhibition with 171 GALLERY, Inner, brings together new works alongside selected paintings from recent years. The exhibition takes as its point of departure a simple yet difficult question: What constitutes what we call our inner world?

Inner considers the subtle processes through which memories, experiences, places, encounters, and present perceptions become part of an internal reality. Rather than understanding the inner self as something fixed or isolated from the world, the exhibition approaches it as something continuously shaped and transformed by what we experience. Gähler gives visual form to these processes without fixing their meaning, leaving space for ambiguity, recurrence, transformation, and for those images that remain within us before they can be fully named.