Amos — Body Archive Project

The large-scale paintings by Noah Kohlbrenner revolve around the Aletsch Glacier and the Märjelen region, a landscape closely tied to his family history. At first glance, these works appear as abstract pictorial spaces that resist immediate interpretation. Only over time do their surfaces begin to reveal fragments of this landscape. This delayed recognition is essential: the paintings challenge the idea of landscape as a distant view and instead point to an understanding of it as something alive.

One point of departure are the Valais legends about spirits and “poor souls,” stories that helped people make sense of floods, natural disasters, and existential threats. The glacier was not seen as an inert mass, but as a force that could react. It was feared and personified. Within this worldview, life, death, and transformation are deeply intertwined.

In the work Walking into silence with pockets full of dust, this exploration becomes particularly condensed. Archival images of gates form the starting point for a pictorial space that moves between reality and transcendence. The gate does not function merely as an architectural detail, but as a threshold: between visibility and invisibility, between the pre