It began with a long-standing admiration for the work of American artist Kottie Paloma. For years we had followed his paintings and drawings, drawn to the intensity of his visual language and the way his compositions move freely between figuration and abstraction. His works carry a distinctive immediacy of expressive gestures, fragmented silhouettes and layered lines that seem spontaneous at first glance, but reveal a quiet internal structure upon closer observation. For a long time we had wanted to find a way to collaborate with him. The opportunity eventually came through an unexpected object: a handle. 

What initially appeared to be a purely functional element gradually revealed itself as a small architectural surface; something that is touched every day, but rarely considered as a carrier of artistic expression.

The challenge was scale. A painting unfolds across a canvas, while a handle compresses the image into a narrow cylindrical form. Sections of gestures, silhouettes and marks are extracted from larger compositions and wrap around the object, gradually revealing different fragments of the image as the handle is turned.

To preserve the tactile and graphic quality of Paloma’s work, the pieces were produced as true silkscreen prints in collaboration with the Berlin-based Handsiebdruckerei, a studio known for its high-quality artist editions. Each pine wood handle was rolled by hand across an inverted silkscreen many times larger than the surface of the object itself.

The result is a limited edition of 23 unique handles, each one produced entirely by hand. No two pieces are exactly alike, shifts in the printing process create variations in rhythm, density and alignment. What emerges is a series of objects that move somewhere between furniture detail and artwork, functional elements that quietly carry the expressive energy of an artist’s gesture.