What's the story with Henni Alftan’s enigmatic, mysterious paintings? The artist isn’t saying

‘I like to find the most banal thing to paint,’ says Helsinki-born, Paris-based artist Henni Alftan. ‘I have no personal mythology, and I'm not interested in it. I'm not trying to find out if you see what I see, if we can share an experience. If the paintings are too particular, it becomes too powerful, and personal. It's not accessible enough for me.’

There is something unsettling in the flat planes, bold expanses of colour and unexpected crops that comprise Alftan’s figurative works, with the level of restraint raising more questions than they answer. ‘We've learned to assume that there is something we're not seeing,’ Alftan adds. ‘I realised that the less I did, the more your imagination developed. In my early painting, there were more events and character, and I realised it would be more interesting to go towards something more mysterious, by concentrating on things that you generally don't pay attention to – that itself is mysterious enough.’

Alftan builds on this feeling of making do with what there is in a new exhibition, ‘By the Skin of My Teeth’, at Sprüth Magers in Berlin. The title, referring to the sensation of just scraping by, reflects the mood of the paintings. Closely cropped, they ask us to zoom in on the details, whether it is a watch positioned perfectly in the middle of a sleeve and glove, the corner of an eye hidden behind sunglasses, or a single coil of hair, on the cusp of being snipped.

For the first time, Alftan is also presenting drawings alongside her paintings. Small in scale, the drawings consider a range of domestic items – paper, matches, a comb – framed and presented as historical museum artefacts.

‘In the paintings, the cropping becomes very important, whereas I'd say the drawings are more about object and hierarchy and arrangement, in an archeological way,’ says Alftan. ‘In the drawings, I am trying to do something that I can't do in painting. My paintings are very architectural and that small scale just wasn't right. In the drawings, it is also about the object, but in a different manner. From afar, they look like an archetype, a minimal representation that I also do in my painting.’

By choosing to focus on the intimate and the mundane, Alftan is reframing the everyday itself, imbuing the perhaps unseen or unconsidered with a new significance. The viewer can’t help but imagine the story in the picture – who spilt the wine? What are they thinking, cooking, feeling? – but Alftan isn’t giving anything away. ‘I don't imagine the stories myself,’ she says. ‘There are many levels of interpretation.’

‘Henni Alftan: By the Skin of My Teeth’ is open from 12 September – 25 October 2025 at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, spruethmagers.com