SpazioA is proud to present CARS. Autos the first solo show by artist Flora Fritz in the gallery project space. The exhibition opens on Saturday, September 27, 2025, following her recent final residency show at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

Emblematic imagery of untrue origin. A pet has to smile. A car has a history of hand-jobs.
“I want to give a form which resists facts, which resists opinion, and which goes beyond actuality, which reaches beyond information — that is why I invented the motif ‘eye and its capacity to see everything red’... The eye doesn’t need to know — the eye just sees, and that’s what counts.”
— Thomas Hirschhorn (quoted in “Truth or Dare: The Art of Witnessing” by David Joselit, Artforum, 2011)

Small paintings suggest privacy and the tenderness of possession — possession that tells the double story of commodity:

The first story of hope and aspiration, fulfilment and joy of life.
The second story of the reduction of personal and interpersonal possibilities through the shifting of behaviour into foreseeable patterns.

Growing up in the 2000s, I often saw an ad for a bank running long-term on German television, trying to appeal to the middle- class, middle-aged man of Germany with the tagline:
“Mein Haus. Mein Auto. Mein Boot.”
This translates to: “My house. My car. My boat.”

My choice of object. My choice of person. My choice of dog.
One of each.

Through painting, there is a chance of returning to non-judgment, where the material fact of what is seen is stronger than its significance in culture. Often I record movies by taking timed screenshots every ten seconds, to get to a place in-between action.

The impulse to try and identify through possession seems deeply idealist — to negotiate every day through desire. It is easy to relate to and hard to leave. Probably so: identity is a toy — you hit it against the wall again and again, it makes a singing sound.

“In this beautiful and healthy life it is only I who has been made to suffer,” says the voice-over in The Colour of Pomegranates, a movie allegedly based on the life of Armenian poet Sayat-Nova but dealing mainly in the language of living images. I often think about this sentence. It lives in the same universe as Gwyneth Paltrow: “I had my first bowl of gazpacho when I was fifteen, in Spain, and the impression it made was a lasting one.”
In remaking these emblems in painting (one of each), they return to the body. By entering a fictional realm, having such figures — a car, a face, a dog — hollowed, they lose their ties to real conditions. They should become something to defy their category.