«Swimmers»

Four figures, mid-run. Bare feet, swimsuits, hair flying. They're heading somewhere fast — into water, probably — but the water isn't there. Just linen. That's the whole point. The canvas doesn't pretend to be a beach or a lake. It stays linen — raw, neutral, honest — and lets the bodies do everything. A red swimsuit fills the foreground, cropped close, almost uncomfortably close. Behind it, three smaller figures blur into motion: blue, green, skin. The scale contrast is deliberate. So is the cropping. So is the fact that no one has a face you can quite read. The raw linen ground does what it always does in Gerda's work: it listens. Warm and open-grained, it lets the figures exist without context or explanation, suspended in a space that feels both timeless and entirely present. The saturated colours — that deep red, the clear blue, the muted green — sit against it like something remembered rather than observed. What stays with you is the particular quality of the group's solitude. They are running together, these four women, and yet each is sealed inside her own momentum, her own breathing, her own small reckoning with the effort of forward motion. There is joy here, but it is quiet joy — the kind that doesn't stop to announce itself.