SETAREH is pleased to present Tell Me I’ll See You Again, our second solo exhibition of German artist, Lilly Varga. The exhibition follows Varga's No Answer, which was held at SETAREH Berlin in September 2025.

Lilly Varga’s paintings are characterised by distinctive world-building. Often depicted in isolation, her vanishing figures occupy dreamscapes, imagined in a rich and evocative palette. Without any clear markers of time or space, her settings lose any sense of context. Instead, the compositions are consumed by the emotional state of her figures. Many of the portraits are tightly cropped and focused entirely on expression, presenting faces gripped by deep feeling. Often small in size, these works command intimacy from the viewer, who must come close to truly appreciate their complexity. Portraiture acts as a means of connection for Varga, a way to tune out of the noise of the exterior world and return to our inner truth.

Across the exhibition, faces emerge in varying states; some are obscured by fields of colour and sweeping gestures, while others stare back with conviction. The portraits are psychologically charged, combining media, colour and texture to produce visceral images that captivate the viewer. The artist’s Fauvist-inspired approach to colour infuses the paintings with intensity, creating an atmospheric resonance that pulls us into her world.

Varga is not interested in the surface of a person. When executing a portrait, she “paints the people [she] meets with [her] eyes closed”. Built slowly in oil and pastel on linen, wood and paper, her portraits aim to capture the “faces that come through once the noise stops”. Varga’s practice rests on the belief that her work can reveal the psyche of her subjects. Freed from the weight of context and visual noise, she is able to excavate raw human emotion.

The titles of the works offer an entryway into Varga’s world. Written in her native tongue of German and subsequently translated into English for this exhibition, the titles function as fragments of an unfolding narrative. Human behaviour is observed without hierarchy; the suspicious individual depicted in The Leech holds an emotional weight equal to the resilient figure of In Good Hands. It is the totality of our nature that Varga is interested in, and her “faces are not divided into those who deserve sympathy and those who don’t”. She asks that we see the unwavering breadth of human emotion as something that unites us. We each have the capacity to be kind, cruel, generous and vindictive. Perhaps what connects us is not our best self, but the whole of it.