FRAGMENTS by FABIEN DETTORI (PHOTO/PAINTING EXHIBTION)

FRAGMENTS brings together works in which photography and painting enter into dialogue to reveal what lies between the lines of the visible. Fabien Dettori approaches the Polaroid as a living, vulnerable material, saturated with traces of an instant, a gesture, a memory. Some prints are deliberately torn and then repaired with 24k gold, in a gesture inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi.

Here, however, gold does more than mend an image: it reveals the fracture, highlights its beauty, and grants it a second life.

Each piece becomes a recomposed fragment of memory, a shard of experience gathered despite its ruptures. Memories are never intact — they crack, transform, reinvent themselves. Memory is fragmented, partial, subjective; it is never a reflection of reality, but an interpretation of it. Within each tear, each golden seam, lies the way our lives are built: through successive layers of altered images and shifting sensations.

This special selection brings together over thirty previously unseen works, chosen directly from the studio. Some are presented for the very first time, while others re-emerge after a long slumber in the archives, revived by the artist’s renewed gaze.

Balancing instant photography with painterly intervention, FRAGMENTS offers a meditation on what we choose to keep, to repair, and to elevate. It is an intimate archaeology in which the image, far from being fixed, becomes a site of transformation — a space where fragility becomes strength, and where fractures turn into light.

Exhibitions
— Berlin, GH36 Gallery, Grosse Hamburger Strasse 36, MITTE — November 4–7, 2025
— Hamburg, Gallery Kohlhöfen, Kohlhöfen 15, 20355 Hamburg — November 11–14, 2025

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Host or Publisher Chloe Guisan