The title of Anna Belén’s first solo exhibition in Spain borrows a term from scientific methodology: the Gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment — a reasoning tool used by philosophers and physicists to test hypotheses before they encounter the resistance of the real. For Belén, this resistance is precisely where painting begins. Working with oil paint, raw pigments, ink, varnish, and sheet metals — copper, gold, brass — combined with rainwater and saltwater, the Hamburg-born, London-based artist (b. 1997) subjects her canvases to genuinely experimental conditions. She paints from both sides of the linen allowing color to seep through the membrane of the fabric; she folds, floods, and oxidizes her surfaces, introducing processes that unfold on their own terms. Materials are not stable components here but active substances that continue to react, shift, and change. A boot print, initially accidental, is later fixed through gilding. The works register transformation rather than fixed composition.

What distinguishes her practice is the rigor with which chance is neither controlled nor abandoned, but engaged. Layers build, collapse, and re-emerge in ways that echo unstable structures of matter, perception, and memory. The resulting surfaces suggest geological formations, river deltas, cellular structures — yet resist any single reading. They do not depict specific places but map shifting internal states in which thoughts form, overlap, and recede.

Developed during Belén’s residency at CCA Andratx in December 2025 and extending research begun at the Royal College of Art in London, GEDANKENEXPERIMENTE proposes that painting is not a way of illustrating ideas but of thinking through them — with materials, time, and the body.

“GEDANKENEXPERIMENTE is a space where thinking is tested rather than resolved. Paintingis a way of entering that space — not to illustrate ideas, but to think with materials, time, and the
body.” — Anna Belén

Anna Belén is a German painter born 1997. She works in Hamburg and London, United Kingdom. Her work is already in prestigious private and public collections, including the prestigious private art collection of Lord Davies of Abersoch CBE in London. In 2021 her work has also been selected to be exhibited at the Institut Français (Hamburg) on the occasion of its 70th anniversary in Germany. In 2024 she was selected for the exhibition ‘Mouvement’ in cooperation with the French Consulate and Institut français in Hamburg. Also in 2024, she had the great honor of being awarded the Lucy Halford Bursary Scholarship for her Master’s program at the Royal College of Art in London.

Text by Esma Derdour, 2026