Sophie von Hellermann: I Did Not Tell Half of What I Saw, Sixi Museum

Within the legend of Marco Polo, there is a famous confession: “I did not tell half of what I saw.” While these words never appear in the main text of The Travels of Marco Polo, they were inscribed on his tomb after his death and have come to symbolise the entirety of his journeys. It is at once a confession and a declaration: language can never exhaust experience, and any narrative reaches only part of the truth. That “untold half” is where memory, illusion, and imagination truly begin. 

Within the galleries of the Sixi Museum, Sophie von Hellermann’s paintings drift like fragments of a floating dream. They echo across space as if forming different chapters of the same narrative, or an extended conversation about time, memory, and emotion. She writes luminous colours upon somber themes, and with airy brushstrokes, tells the weight of history. In these works, history does not exist as fact, but as a sensuous experience that is constantly rewritten. Just as Marco Polo’s travelogue oscillates between fact and fantasy, von Hellermann’s work operates in the interplay of seeing and imagining. This is painting at its most intimate and most open: where the viewer senses the artist’s own breath while being compelled to confront their own perspectives and biases. Every history bears its fissures, every act of seeing contains forgetting. And it is precisely within this “untold half” that art breathes—and thought unfolds.