ROSALIE
WERTHEFRONGEL
Reinventing
Images
“Painting requires time, both in its creation and in its viewing. This temporality is essential for me;
it resists the transience of digital images.” – Rosalie Werthefrongel
“Painting requires time, both in its creation
and in its viewing. This temporality is
essential for me; it resists the transience
of digital images.” – Rosalie Werthefrongel
With KOMM MIT, her first solo exhibition at KÖNIG TELEGRAPHENAMT, Rosalie Werthefrongel explores the space between digital image and painterly reality. Her works blend fragments of art history and pop culture, transforming familiar motifs into new, dreamlike constellations. Through a meticulous process of collecting, arranging, and painting, she creates scenes that invite reflection rather than resolution—images that resist digital transience and unfold through time. On the occasion of the exhibition, KÖNIG GALERIE spoke with the artist about transformation, timelessness, and the enduring presence of painting.
KÖNIG GALERIE: Your paintings emerge from a long process of collecting, arranging, digitizing, and painting. How do you experience the moment when the digital sketch turns into painting—is it more of a translation, a letting go, or a new beginning?
ROSALIE WERTHEFRONGEL: At first, this moment in front of the blank canvas has something incredibly euphoric and joyful about it. My digital sketch serves as a kind of intermediate layer, an arrangement in which many things are hinted at. I try to clarify as much as possible before I start painting. When I begin to paint, this preliminary stage transforms into something of its own, something concrete. Thanks to my preparatory work, I can fully engage with the paint as a material while painting. The drawings, textures, and layers open up new connections that were not visible before. In painting, coincidences, resistances, and even losses arise that change the image and bring it to life. That is why I would describe it as a conscious transformation with spontaneous reinventions.
© Courtesy of the artist
KG: You “hijack” art-historical images and place them in new, sometimes surreal contexts. How do you decide which motifs or epochs to bring into your visual world and confront with each other?
RW: I rarely decide this based on a rational plan at first. Often, an initial impulse arises from a single detail—an object with a certain color, shape, or memory, a mood created by light, a composition that stays with me. For me, pop culture or art history motifs are like memory particles from collective imagery. When I pick them up, my aim is to transport these familiar images into a different present. I often juxtapose them with things from our everyday lives today—seemingly banal objects, toys, advertising, digital fragments—and see what happens in this encounter. Sometimes they brush against each other, sometimes they merge.
KG: You once mentioned that you want your works to remain relevant even 50 years from now. What does “timeless relevance” mean to you—and how do you try to inscribe it into your paintings?
RW: This term must, of course, be viewed in relative terms. I would say that “timeless relevance” means creating something that transcends the moment, at least as long as one remains within the realm of human comprehension. I believe that images can endure if they pose questions to the viewer in some way without providing answers. In this way, part of the image always arises from the immediate moment between the viewer and the image. I try to play with patterns of perception, ideas from images, memories, and longings that can always be reinterpreted—always depending on the viewer and the time in which they find themselves.
Installation view by Roman März © Courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE
KG: Your works convey precisely this feeling, that they never want to give a clear answer. How important is this open dialogue between the image and the viewer to you?
RW: Very important, even disregarding its “timeless relevance.” I don't want to offer complete narratives, but rather pictorial spaces in which something can unfold. I am interested in how people enter these pictorial worlds, what stories or questions they discover in them, what seems strange or familiar to them. Every reception is a kind of small reinvention of the image, and only then is it truly complete.
KG: In an era where images are mostly consumed digitally, you rely on the analog power of painting. What can a painted image do, in your view, that a digital one never could?
RW: A painted picture has a physical presence, a physicality that cannot be simulated digitally. The layers of paint, the light, the materiality—all of this changes depending on the angle and distance. Painting requires time, both in its creation and in its viewing. This temporality is essential for me; it resists the transience of digital images.
