Do you feel the same?

Allistair Walter

11.9.-27.9.2025

11.9.2025, 6-9pm

It can easily happen that a moment from childhood, say, the first time on a swing and the feeling of soaring through the air, might later reveal itself as something more uncertain: an image lifted from a photograph, a sensation misremembered into being. It then acquires new significance, no longer valuable as a memory, but a reminder of how cunning the act of remembering can be. The slippery process of recollection becomes a glimpse into the generously flexible nature of the human mind, with memories and fantasy blending past and future together.

Allistair Walter’s solo exhibition Do You Feel the Same? engages this tension between memory and its distortions. As a whole, Walter’s practice understands memory not as a fixed record of events, but a collection of elusive impressions that continuously shift over time to align with our personal narratives. His works attempt not to reconstruct the past, but to touch the fleeting feeling it leaves behind. In paintings that move between figuration and abstraction, Walter revisits moments of his own life, drawing on an extensive personal archive while continually probing the boundaries of painting — stretching its limits and questioning its definitions. Material experimentation is central to this process, incorporating techniques such as printing on fabric, scanning, burning, disfiguring, and reassembling images that began as Polaroids or snapshots on his phone. As layers accumulate and paintings begin to resemble printed images, the line between what is painted and what is not becomes blurred. Much like the unpredictable nature of his subject matter, Walter’s works drift through ambiguous terrain, where the contours of form are continually dissolving into uncertainty.

The glossy, resin-coated surfaces that lend many of his paintings their photographic sheen offer an additional protective layer, sealing the fragile moments underneath. One is tempted to veer into nostalgia, but perhaps that is too simple. Instead, Walter’s work gestures at the allure of nostalgia, conveying a desire to turn inward and retain moments that felt real. This impulse is reflected in Walter’s intimate scenes, places of safety and containment sequestered from the world. They are environments that, in their minuteness, feel like worlds unto themselves. And despite revealing nothing of what lies ahead, this omission suggests an exterior that is, if not threatening, then at the very least uncertain. While these works remain embedded in Walter’s personal world, their lingering impressions extend far beyond. Do you feel the same? Yes. Probably. A lot of the time. But also — what is it about a body of work rooted entirely in the subjective that makes it so relatable, so much more universal, often, than when we attempt to include too much of everything?

Press release by Sophie Cassel
Photos: Peter Oliver Wolff, Berlin

EIGEN + ART Lab

The EIGEN + ART Lab opened in 2015 as the young project space of the gallery EIGEN + ART and acts as an experimental platform for contemporary art in Berlin.
The Lab is interested in current positions that deal with the zeitgeist and operates both in Germany and internationally. In contrast to the Galerie EIGEN + ART, the artists exhibited are not fixed in a gallery program, but vary from year to year. In this way, the EIGEN + ART Lab offers artists the space and opportunity to realize their projects in a gallery context. This enables them to gain their first in-depth experience of the art scene and the art market.

EIGEN + ART Lab is founded 2012 and since January 2015 located at Torstraße 220.

Jakob Schäfer

Torstraße 220
10115 Berlin

Tel. + 49 – 30 ‐ 308 779 40
lab@eigen-art.com