all that grows
$25.00
This poster, featuring Melike Kara’s ‘echo’ (2026), was designed by Archie Barr for ‘all that grows’, the debut exhibition of artist Melike Kara in Sweden presented by Carl Kostyál and Jan Kaps at Hospitalet, Stockholm.
The exhibition brings together a new body of painting that sees Kara working with coffee grounds, oil stick, acrylic and ink on canvas. Drawing on the ritual of coffee divination, the works extend her longstanding interest in cultural inheritance and collective memory through chance, transformation and connection. First introduced at Art Basel (2025), they were most recently exhibited in ‘Whispers’ at Kunsthaus Hamburg, 2026, curated by Anna Nowak, on view until August 23, 2026.
“For some time now, Kara has incorporated coffee grounds into her paintings. She grew up with a grandmother who read the patterns left behind in coffee grounds – a familiar domestic ritual in which the future was divined through the traces remaining in the cup, a practice later passed on to Kara herself. Within the paintings, the coffee grounds relinquish this former function and become a new painterly material. What was once used to read the future now begins to write its own history across the surface of the work. In much the same way, photographs become ash and the archive becomes painting. Transformation is not simply a theme in Kara’s practice – it is her method.
We instinctively search for motifs, narratives and meaning. Melike Kara’s new paintings propose something else. They allow colour, light and material to exist without coalescing into anything immediately recognisable. The viewer encounters a form of painting that opens a space and invites presence. This shift does not appear as a break with Kara’s earlier practice, but as its continuation through different means. The image no longer needs to represent an identity to carry it; it has moved from the motif into the gesture itself.
– Tessa Praun, Curator and Writer
The Wanderlust Institute of Art