Lexia Hachtmann’s Out Of The Plain unfolds in a landscape of wandering, where signs flicker between disclosure and concealment: two ivory flags, a dead flower, a ship anointed with eyes. The exhibition takes the artist’s trip to Malta as a point of departure – an island shaped by centuries of conquest and exchange. Hachtmann encounters a place dense with overwritten histories, shifting mythologies and fractured narratives – half-recognised yet ultimately indecipherable to her as a visitor to a foreign land.
The show renders this idea of unfixed records into a surface where past, present, myth and mundane reality refuse to settle into a singular account. In turn, the viewer is drawn into a site where signification is provisional, and symbols slip from their moorings.
The exhibition takes its name from a poem by German writer and translator Michael Krüger (trans. Agnes Stein). Out Of The Plain suggests both a vast, open expanse and the act of stepping beyond – the painter’s canvas, the known world – into a space where time and imagination extend in all directions. Following an instinctive, almost fated logic, the poem was discovered by the artist only after the paintings for the hitherto untitled show were complete, yet it shares much of their language, populated by fleeting, inscrutable symbols: ‘an ambitious hand / lacking a flag’; a ‘dried plant’; ‘birds which fly / diagonally across the sentences’.
Krüger’s poem is a meditation on identity, isolation and the search for meaning in a vast, indifferent landscape. It speaks of a protagonist torn between being a passive part of the world – a road, a stone, a dried plant – and the desire to actively ‘rewrite the map’ of existence, ‘to set the borders elsewhere’, retreating from known structures and leaving clues behind. It evokes a world where definition is elusive, where ‘metaphors are dead’, where language fails to bridge the gap between self and other.
Hachtmann’s paintings echo this tension. The plain she paints is populated by archetypes that refuse to settle and images that remain undeciphered. A goat might signify fertility or the devil; a Triton might guard the city or drown it. This land cannot sustain allegory: only gestures, warnings, invitations. Like the protagonist of Krüger’s poem, Hachtmann’s figures are often isolated and exist in a state of restless negotiation, poised between protection and abandonment, stewardship and control. Yet they do not surrender to passivity: they survey, they watch, they wait. They are both walker and road, fugitive and fool.
Out Of The Plain is an invitation to follow signs with every expectation and none at all, where understanding recedes the moment it is grasped. The exhibition meditates on the process of reading clues – both in the world and within ourselves – and on the stories we tell to make sense of our place in the plain. Hachtmann’s work reminds us that the act of searching is itself a form of meaning.
Text by Sophie Barshall