Odd weeks: Lenke Rothman

You only have to look at the room around you! The All-American idol flags, along with the Soviet flag, have been threaded through wooden lattices, resembling something in between prison bars and pallets. Beautiful, multicoloured strips of fabric run through and button into the basket-weaver’s remarkable, house-like framework.

Tiny, drawn cross-stitching, the symbol of peaceful intimacy, meets with the world’s unfathomable complexity, its eternal large-scale and miniature dramas. Meanings are woven between works that are so disparate in Lenke Rothman’s oeuvre that they could not previously be shown – and works so new that they have never before been seen. Our gaze moves with tentative precision across associative leaps and transformations.

There is always a story behind Lenke Rothman’s works. The story is meaningful but not always Good. A personal encounter, a baffling coincidence, a notice in the paper, or a discovery at the basket-weaver’s in a village in the Azores. Always, however, with a resonance that in its literal relentlessness actually makes the good story impossible – in the light of her experience as a survivor of the Holocaust.

Lenke Rothman’s stories disappear into the works, without necessarily merging with them. Instead, the stories seem to generate new, surprising meanings. Meanings which, in turn, are entwined with our own associations, and then interwoven with the surrounding works.

This transformation always comes as a surprise – the artist’s leaps are entirely unpredictable and breathtakingly bold. And yet, her works feel so strangely familiar, like old acquaintances. It’s uncanny.