2020-2021

related press:

selection of works

I’m fascinated by Monet’s Water Lily paintings and the way he is translating the visual experience of water into color. Water itself has no color yet we see it in ever changing colors. It is a floating surface, such are mine (my painting’s surfaces) too. I find it interesting that water is a metaphor of emotions and that just as you can dive into water my paintings invite for a swim or dive too, in an emotional sense.

Painting as emotional matter — Water as metaphor of emotions

My mother had a Marc Chagall poster hanging in our house, from his retrospective – I believe it was 1967, in Köln where she went with her old light blue Volkswagen together with her love, and without telling her parents. The love passed away, and unfortunately the poster was adhered on a board with the wrong glue so that it kept breaking and dissolving. My mom needed to restore it eventually. I watched her trials of mixing the soft Chagall blue-grey shades out of the entire spectrum. It’s in a way just what I’m doing now in my studio – layering of muted tones for preserving fading memories, feelings, thoughts.

(Platform Art, 2021)

„Sunlight is an activator of my paintings. My technique of layering and use of material makes my color light-responsive. It alters in nuance with the changing light. Which, by the way, causes a huge challenge to capture / document them. In the studio I oftentimes alternate between looking outside the window and then back to the paintings. I foremost work in natural light, and as the day wanes I prefer a dark or almost dark studio to switching on electric light. This might sound like an unusual setup for a visual medium, but when you break it down, color is just wavelengths that our brain turns into a visual phenomenon.“

„Waking up in a Botticelli“ is a painting that I made right after the isolation due to the COVID-19 outbreak in NYC. It is the first painting namely referencing an Old Master. Together with collages I made in the previous weeks from home, also inspired by the Old Masters, it is groundbreaking for all my further work until today.

Collages, spring 2020

I made this video on the occasion of the online exhibition „Try this at Home“ by Albada Jelgersma Gallery (2020), to share some insights about my life as an artist in New York during the lockdown due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. (The video is muted as the original sound was distracting for this page.)