Down Below: Press release

 

 

Location
artothek, Cologne, Germany

Dates
January 15 – February 28, 2026

 

In her exhibition Down Below at artothek, Cécile Lempert presents large-format paintings that explore the narrative of remembering a lost homeland and family.

Using historical photographs of the Dildilian family, a successful Armenian dynasty of photographers, she develops an atmospheric reflection on emotional ties to family and the memory of places of origin, raising the question of what remains of this rootedness in one’s own history, for people that are persecuted and displaced.

She juxtaposes the atmospheric photographs of the Dildilians with William Golding’s trilogy of novels To the Ends of the Earth, the last volume of which, Fire Down Below, inspired the title of the exhibition. In this novel, a young man undergoes a process of personal maturation during a sea voyage to the far end of the world. After leaving his homeland, the sea, the ship, and the long journey represent a phase of uncertainty in which his transformation can take place, even if unknown dangers lurk beneath the façade of social order. 

Cécile Lempert transports her pictorial motifs through formal considerations into a temporality reminiscent of film sequences. The visible image – often constructed as a close-up – shows only a single moment within a narrative thread that implies what came before and strives for what follows.

– Jasper Lohmar