A Happy Day - Katharina Arndt

soloshow @ VIN Gallery | Shanghai

Opening: 26.04.25 | 11-6 pm

For Katharina Arndt, it might look like bleaching your hair in the afternoon, working from home in your pajamas, or sharing a bottle of bubbly with a friend at Mister Hu. Her world is stitched together from these fleeting moments — intimate yet performative, ordinary yet Instagrammable.

Arndt’s practice begins with looking — less from voyeurism or cynicism, and more from a fascination with the profane culture of contemporary life: the everyday choreography of pleasure, appearance, and hedonistic escapism. Her paintings adopt the very visual language they examine: bright, saturated, and deliberately naive.

In this exhibition, Arndt seeks to create space for moments of child-like play and wonder — brief interludes in which viewers can momentarily unburden themselves of quotidian anxieties. For Arndt, paradise is always now — but never without its fractures. “My hope for my work is that people smile and have the opportunity to reflect about the superficiality of it all. That’s my goal.”