GALERIE SARA LILY PEREZ
09 OCTOBER – 01 NOVEMBER 2025
Galerie Sara Lily Perez presents the group exhibition The Defragmentation of the Garden of Eden, bringing together works by Tanja Selzer, Laura Eckert, and Daniel Sambo-Richter.
Eden – traditionally understood as a mythical place of innocence, abundance, and origin – appears in this exhibition not as a harmonious whole, but as a broken and reassembled landscape. It is reframed as a site where beauty endures through fragmentation, and where destruction and renewal coexist.
Selzer’s large-scale paintings open the exhibition with lush, charged visions of an eroticised paradise. Her figures inhabit spaces that blur boundaries between the intimate and the untamed, the seductive and the dangerous. Selzer’s works touch on the voyeuristic gaze, human desire, and the fragility of bodies amid vibrant natural scenes, offering viewers a reflection on how passions and instincts shape our own personal Edens.
Eckert translates the Edenic narrative into sculpture, working with fragments of recycled and weathered wood. Out of damaged and discarded material, vulnerable figures emerge - lean, fragile, yet resilient. Each sculpture bears visible marks of its process: cracks, splinters, and uneven textures that are not concealed but embraced, speaking of time, memory, and renewal. In her works, the act of defragmentation becomes a metaphor for human survival and reconstruction, where brokenness does not signify loss but the possibility of transformation.
Daniel Sambo-Richter confronts audiences with overwhelming imagery of landscapes, catastrophes, and abstractions. His painting oscillates between beauty and menace, allegory and abyss – an Eden already burning, melting, or collapsing.
The Defragmentation of the Garden of Eden presents paradise as a state in flux. Defragmentation implies a dual movement: disintegration and reconstruction, loss and creation, rupture and renewal. This exhibition views Eden not only as a biblical or mythological concept but as a metaphor for personal, ecological, and collective states of being.
In the dialogue between Selzer’s intimate tableaux, Eckert’s salvaged and reconfigured sculptures, and Sambo-Richter’s serene abstractions, Eden emerges not as a fixed place of origin but as a living process - desire turning into vulnerability, fragmentation opening up new possibilities, and transformation arising from reimagined fragments. Rather than depicting devastation, the interplay of these artistic voices suggests that even in broken moments, the garden remains a space of hope, beauty, and gentle renewal.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Tanja Selzer (1970, Idar-Oberstein, Germany) is a painter who explores themes of sensuality, voyeurism, and human experience. She studied design at the University of Applied Sciences Hamburg. Selzer creates complex paintings by transferring images from media, photos, and film stills onto her canvases. Her work opens up new, sometimes ambiguous spaces beyond the original images. Her paintings invite viewers into intimate, fragmented worlds that challenge social norms. Tanja lives and works in Berlin and has shown her art widely across Europe and internationally.
Laura Eckert (b. 1983, Trier) is a sculptor based in Leipzig whose work centers on the human figure and portrait. Her expressive sculptures, often created from recycled wood and stone, probe the mutual relationships between cultural, social, biological, and psychological aspects of human existence. Eckert constructs her figures from assembled and layered materials such as scrap wood, floorboards, and beams, embracing knots, cracks, and irregularities as key aesthetic elements. The resulting fragments and transitions mirror both the life cycle of the materials and the vulnerability of the human body, capturing moments of passage, transformation, and resilience.
Daniel Sambo-Richter (b. 1966, Görlitz) is a Berlin-based painter whose practice ranges from abstraction to figuration, with a deep engagement in landscapes, history, and the intersections of culture and nature. Educated at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden in Cottbus, Sambo-Richter has received numerous scholarships and residencies, and his works have been exhibited internationally, including in Angola, the U.S., Poland, Denmark, and Germany.
