Babette Semmer

Gentle Parenting @ Klemm's Downstairs

Exploring complex social topographies of everyday violence and domesticity, Semmer constructs atmospherically charged paintings that point toward the threshold between threat and empathy. She synthesizes a wide array of motifs and sources–from archival material, to film stills, AI-generated imagery, and personal photographs–, and transforms everyday situations into stages of suspense, assembling fictional landscapes filled with ambiguity and open-ended associations.

Semmer’s interest in images is rooted in their capacity to both convey and conceal. Across her vast landscape of spaces and objects anonymous and biographical references coexist, all formally unified through her distinctive style of painting. Sand is a constant presence in her compositions—a conceptual device that not only enables her to move beyond the conventions of both photography and painting, but also brings together her diverse visual worlds within a hazy, atmospheric terrain where mood and affect come to the foreground.

In doing so, she explores questions of authenticity through atmospherically charged imagery. Ultimately, Semmer plays with the notion of familiarity, as she portrays and seizes relatable, everyday objects and scenarios into the fictional realm. She stresses, speculates, reveals hidden gestures underneath banality: children in their rooms, cows in a stall, shrubs at night in the park. Banality as mystery means: everything that one recognizes is suddenly undecipherable.

May an abstract interweaving of lines that criss-cross, overlap and intertwine be the proof of an accident, maybe a crime? May it reveal a situation of distress where the flash was used as a cry for help? Or may the flash only have been used as a torch? Above all, the question is how recognition–and especially image recognition in an era of image overload–may turn into a speculative exercise. By juxtaposing disparate visual worlds, Semmer brings to the surface the threshold between the uncanny and the domestic, forming a field of tension in which placid scenes distort toward invocation and enigma.

Babette Semmer (*1989, London) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Städelschule. Semmer has received numerous awards and grants, including the Berlin Senate’s Fine Art Working Grant in 2024. She participated in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Oldenburger Kunstverein (2026), and Studio Hanniball, Berlin (2025). Selected group exhibitions include Spoiler Zone, Berlin (2026); Volker Diehl and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2025); Parfümerie, Frankfurt, and Gruppe Motto, Hamburg (2024). Her work has also previsouly been shown at Bonner Kunstverein, Städelmuseum, Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt, Turf Projects and Zona Mista, among others.