Vera Palme

Bottleneck

13 November - 20 December 2025

You enter a tunnel from the slim end of a question mark, the interrogation point. 
The general tunnel idea is in and out again the other side, there is no going back. 
The question comes in the curve. 
Doodle on the floorplan, it’s a stretch, but obviously a good one. It serves to oversimplify and to create issues to reflect on where there were none before. 
Like abstract painting.
A bottleneck is a localized disruption. The result of specific physical conditions, points of vulnerability, subjects of action. An organizing principle to relay general uneasiness that is irritating but you could call interesting. 
Or aggressively facing decisions that others have made regardless of you, and pointing with your outstretched finger at them until you tire and lose aim. 
Or sometimes it’s you who makes decisions of significance and they pull the rug out from under. 
How far can you carry the eclectic show practice before it finally congeals (into either style or something else silly, to happily chip away at).

V.P.

Galerie Buchholz is proud to announce Bottleneck, the first solo exhibition in the U.S. by Vera Palme (*1983, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main), and her second solo exhibition with Galerie Buchholz after her show Immer realistischere Malerei at our Berlin location in January 2024. In the Spring of this past year, Kunsthalle Winterthur presented Palme’s solo show Diversion, followed in September by Potential d’en face, a two-person show together with Laura Langer at Etablissement d’en face in Brussels. Recent group and solo exhibitions include Jetzt und Nie at the Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg (2024), Frankfurter Kreuz at Bizarro in Copenhagen (2023), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff-Stipendium. Die Ausstellung 2023 at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2023), Das Lied der Strasse - 2nd Biennale für Freiburg in Freiburg (2023); Tolia Astakhishvili: The First Finger. Chapter I at Bonner Kunstverein and Tolia Astakhishvili: The First Finger. Chapter II at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (both 2023), Jahresgaben 2022 at Kunstverein in Hamburg (2022), and Lose Enden at Kunsthalle Bern (2021). Vera Palme studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste-Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee in Berlin and has been the recipient of various awards and grants, including the 2020-2022 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium.