Von Racknitz + Baer Gallery is pleased to present Playing with Fire, the inaugural solo exhibition of recent paintings by Lewinale Havette in Berlin, in partnership with Palo Gallery New York.

Lewinale Havette's inaugural Berlin exhibition features eight paintings and eight works on paper exploring the body as both medium and message — a field where emotion, memory, and power intertwine.

Across cultures, the body has long been seen as more than flesh; it is a vessel, a threshold where power, memory, and spirit converge. This exhibition treats the body as such: an active field where desire and dominance, love and violence, are inscribed.

These works traverse a spectrum of human emotions: tenderness and wounding, intimacy and control. Love appears here as a double force capable of binding, sheltering, and transforming, yet also of restraining and undoing. It echoes the artist’s struggle with those closest to her, men and mother alike, where affection was entangled with power, protection with dominance.

In this terrain, the question of who holds power and how is never neutral. The works evoke the charged tension of women who resist erasure, figures who stand at the edge of fire and refuse to be consumed. Like mythic heroines and modern icons, they embody strength in the face of control, vulnerability turned into sovereignty.

Here, fire is not cast only as ruin but as clarifier, an alchemy that refines what persists when form collapses. Each piece becomes a vessel for this transformation, carrying what cannot be spoken: ancestral echoes, unyielding memories, and the quiet persistence of the spirit.

Suspended between fragility and resilience, submission and defiance, these works do not narrate but invoke. They inhabit the space where the body becomes both medium and message, where the unseen is felt as atmosphere, an invocation that lingers like breath between realms.

Playing with Fire opens November 8th, 2025, at VRB Gallery, Clausewitzstraße 2, 10629 Berlin. The opening reception with drinks starts at 4pm until 10pm. The artist will be present.