Dreams After Lunch: Billy Bagilhole & Katja Farin

In this duo exhibition, Katja Farin and Billy Bagilhole investigate how interior worlds mediate encounters with the everyday. Beginning with the familiar, cafés, gardens, phone calls, flowers, pints, the sun and moon, both artists reframe these quotidian motifs, charging them with emotion, memory, and speculative imagination. Their practices invite viewers to inhabit parallel dreamscapes, where the boundaries of reality are gently destabilised, and fluid, psychologically resonant forms take shape.

Katja Farin’s figurative paintings capture moments poised between subconscious reverie and material reality. Her androgynous figures inhabit ambiguous, dreamlike spaces in which heightened color and emotional intensity manifest internal dialogues informed by trauma, longing, and the pressures of socialization. Here, the everyday is reimagined as a stage for psychic negotiation, a site where coping strategies, aspirations, and shifting subjectivities are rendered through bodies at once familiar and enigmatic.

Billy Bagilhole, by contrast, navigates the everyday through narrative construction and recurring symbols. His lexicon, wilted flowers, matchboxes, the sun and moon, pints of Guinness, compose a visual language of comfort and recognition. Bagilhole’s works extend an invitation to the viewer: to imagine without constraint, to speculate openly, and to recover the generative playfulness of meaning-making.

Together, Farin and Bagilhole orchestrate a dialogue between emotional intensity and narrative expansiveness, psychological depth and symbolic wonder. While Farin’s figures draw the viewer inward, Bagilhole’s symbolic worlds invite projection and play. Their practices converge in a mutual investment in the everyday as a locus of transformation, a domain where vulnerability, memory, and imagination intersect. The exhibition is thus conceived as a space for wandering and invention: a threshold between introspection and narration, where viewers are invited to look inward and dream outward.