2024
ISABELLA MARTIN
lives and works in Copenhagen
Isabella Martin is a visual artist who navigates the friction between the world and the body, drawing connections across spatial and temporal scales, between embodied experience and scientific knowledge. Her practice is driven by interdisciplinary collaboration, in-depth research and material experimentation. She works contextually and across media, using sculpture, drawing and film to explore the nature of our entanglement with our environment. Her recent projects focus on fluid states and turbulent rhythms, ecological, biological and cultural, working with an expanding group of collaborators including geologists, physicists and biologists, sailors and schoolchildren.
The Long Wait, 2021, Uddenskulptur, Sweden
PATRYCJA ORZECHOWSKA
lives and works in Gdańsk
Visual artist, author of art books, specialises in photography, collage, ceramics, installation, collecting, graphic design and ready-mades, but prefers to practice crop rotation; graduated from the Faculty of Painting and Graphics, specialising in graphic design, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Interdisciplinary Doctorate at the Faculty of Multimedia Communication, University of Fine Arts in Pozńan Her works have been shown in dozens of individual and group exhibitions. Lives and works in Gdańsk. In her recent work she mainly deals with OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) and the relationship between people and objects. This relationship is often obsessive, loving and sentimental. As a collector of miserable things of dubious beauty and usefulness, surrounded by an ever-growing collection of 'rubbish', she sees herself as a person addicted to objects. At the same time as she works on the remains, the ready-made objects, the human body, she casually cultivates physical and mental recycling. By working on the archives and making collages from old newspapers and books, sculpting the body like clay, building new forms and meanings from the collections of clustered objects, she still has to deal with the appealing materiality and the hell of things.
photo: Andrzej Karmasz
2023
AKVILĖ ANGLICKAITĖ
lives and works in Vilnius
Throughout her artistic practice, Akvilė Anglickaitė has worked with various media - photography, moving images, film, sound, spatial installations. Regardless of the choice of medium, paradoxes, doubts, all-encompassing uncertainties are at the heart of her art. In her recent work, Akvilė has focused on culturally and emotionally saturated images of water from documentations of the dark depths of Lithuanian lakes to oceans, created by algorithms or metaphorical waterless rivers that find their way into centuries-old architecture.
Ocean, 2019, YMCA Jerusalem
MENG-CHAN YU
lives and works in Kiel
Meng-Chan Yu is a visual artist who specializes in ceramic materials. She explores the material from different angles, including the development of working methods that reveal the material properties in terms of the solid and liquid forms of ceramics. For her, clay as an artistic material is not limited to firing in a ceramic kiln, but also an unfired and recyclable material. Her work represents a combination of material research and artistic concepts related to nature, ecology, and the environment. She currently works with locally collected clay and sand to tell the geological and ecological story of a region. Meng-Chan Yu comes from Taiwan. Since 2009, she works and lives in Kiel, Germany.
2022; soil, sand and natural stones from Fränsta (SE), clay; various sizes, 15 stones (6 real natural stones, 9 stones made by the artist)
2022
ANGELIKA J. TROJNARSKI
*1979, lives and works in Düsseldorf
Angelika J. Trojnarski’s work unifies her deep appreciation for nature’s inherent fundamental power and the scientific study of its phenomena, with the human predilection to harness it for its own purposes. Through a process involving a range of different materials and techniques centered on painting as a primary medium, her works articulate allegorical relationships between some of the most significant contentions of our time: humans and nature, strength and fragility, and crisis and hope. She is directly influenced by extraordinary and varied environmental occurrences, experienced throughout her research travels and residencies. By examining facets of nature through a scientific lens, she expresses a desire to understand nature and its workings, and to reproduce these events in a sensual and poetic way, pointing to its incredible might while underscoring its increasing fragility.
Pyrocene V, 2021, paper collage, sanded, soot, 48 x 38,5 cm
BÄRBEL PRAUN
* 1978, lives and works in Hamburg
Bärbel Praun is a visual artist working at the intersection of photography, sculpture and performance. Her most recent bodies of work deal with her obsession with the climate crisis, the pollution and exploitation of the Earth, which deeply influences the content and methodology of her work. Using found objects, she creates ephemeral sculptures and installations that address the relationship between object, material and space, the value of our everyday material world and the visibility of process and time. After having lived a nomadic life for many years, she decided to settle down in Hamburg in 2018. Bärbel loves the mountains, forests and the sea, walking, hiking and running.
APUA, 2021, film still from performance © CelataPraun
OKSANA YUSHKO
lives and works in Moscow
Oksana Yushko is a photographer and visual artist, currently addressing projects in Russia and Europe with a particular focus on the Baltic Sea region. Her visual
approach combines documentation, sociology, and anthropology, and her media are photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Yushko’s research lies at the intersection of memory and
post-trauma, ecology and biopolitics. Her particular interest in the relationship between humans and nature finds reflection in her artistic works. Yushko’s work has been critically acclaimed,
and is widely exhibited in galleries throughout the world. She has many publications to her name.
Cast the Net, 2019, project installation
2021
KNUT SENNEKAMP
*1980; lives and works in Hamburg
Knut Sennekamp’s work revolves around an interest in fiction: its various languages, its particular logic, and the residue it leaves in a reading of reality. Working primarily in photography, he looks to find meaning generated at the margins of the actual images - for instance, what impulse motivates the taking of a particular photograph in a given moment, and how this significantly informs the image itself; or how formal strategies such as collages or photo-videos can be used to assert different meanings dormant in the images. An avid pedestrian, he collects most of his images during extended walks. On principle, these images are unplanned, and serve as the base material for later works, often combined with other media such as text or sound.
Landschaft und Montur, 2019, collage, 25 x 37,5 cm
UTE WASSERMANN
*1960; lives and works in Berlin
Ute Wassermann tours the world as an improviser, she realises audiovisual voice performances / installations and compositions for soloists and ensembles. At the core of her research is an ongoing and uncompromised exploration of her voice. Ute Wassermann´s otherworldy singing transcends the human voice. She sings multidimensional sculptural sounds oscillating between electronic, animalistic, inorganic and human qualities. Her methods to extend and alienate the voice include the use of bird whistles, lo-fi electronics, resonators, objects, fieldrecordings and different types of microphones. Sound environments are an important source for her imagination as well as scientific research in anthropology and biology. Her performances engage with everyday objects or self invented instruments for voice which can take shape as acoustic costumes.
photo: Giorgia Fanelli
2020
SIMONE KESSLER
*1985; lives and works in Hamburg
As an interdisciplinary artist Kessler explores ideas, materials, processes and structures to translate them into numerous new artistic forms. These can range from installation, sculpture, object, object performance, photography, drawing to video. Simone’s artworks invite the viewer to enter new personal levels through reflection and emotion. With her artworks she wants to raise important questions about perspective and show cracks in the familiar. Simone‘s works are based on the ambivalence between expectation and aesthetic fascination.
SOMETHING FALLS APART — 1mm a decade, work in progress, Ahrenshoop
ANNA KUBELÍK
lives and works in Lucerne
Music and science inform Anna Kubelík’s practice. In the last years she has been exploring climate, thermodynamics, mathematical theories on particle collisions and
most recently the issue of plastic waste. These themes inform the dimension, shape and material as well as the medium she chooses for her wide-facetted scope of work, which ranges from large
kinetic installations to sculptures and performance. Her projects often lead to collaborations with artists from other fields as well as with educational and cultural institutions and
scientists.
work in progress, Ahrenshoop
2019
PETER RUEHLE
*1975; lives and works in Berlin
„...Ruehle's principle is easy to identify: He typifies elevations and stylises colours, pushing everything together along the imaginary line of the horizon, thus
recreating the epitome of landscape. John Berger, who was born in London in 1926 and was an inspired art critic, once wrote that we stop in front of a sublime painting like "in front of an animal
that looks at us". That we only recognize the "face of a thing" when it "looks at us“. Peter Ruehle's travel images look very directly into the viewer's eye; and this feature is perhaps even more
important than the solid oil on wood painting or the sophisticated aesthetics. For they are paintings with longings, doubts, and hopes; innermost, just like one hears one's own breath when
bathing in the bathtub, when one keeps one's ears under water."
Andrea Rook
Landscape Study, 2019, oil on cardboard, 17,5 x 12,5 cm
2018
BORIS BECKER
*1961; lives and works in Cologne
„...Nevertheless, the pictures only live through the imagination of the viewer. "For the viewer of the picture, the background story may be completely meaningless
under certain circumstances," explains Becker and continues: "He only perceives the visual stimuli and feels a slight doubt about the title of the work. Much more important, however, is the
possibility for the viewer to place this picture completely freely in its own imaginary context". Such a possibility is most likely to arise in the field of abstraction, because the
representational end always brings with it a reference to reality and thus also to a true event. In contrast, the abstract or the abstracted is rather free and leaves a lot of room for own
interpretations and associations. For Boris Becker, the confrontation with the everyday is therefore the core of his artistic work. Banality is transformed into poetry. The tension in his
pictures arises because art is seen as autonomous and beyond the everyday. By advocating the everyday, by embracing the unspectacular, the artist also redefines our concept of art and provides us
with insights into things we thought we already understood. By transforming the everyday, by exploring the unspectacular, he opens up a new way for us to recognize not only the world around us,
but also ourselves.”
Gérard A. Goodrow
Griethausen, 2016, c - print on aludibond, 180 x 220 cm
TORSTEN RUEHLE
*1975; lives and works in Berlin
„...As if to restate matters, there is simultaneously clarity and ambiguous uncertainty that pervades and quite deliberately unnerves the immediate viewing experience. Indeed, principles of the opaque and the transparent inform all of the paintings. The objects thus also take on a sense of faded memory and errant forgetfulness, a sense of presence expressed in the half-remembered. As with all the decorative objects referred to, though invariably period-based and stylistically recognisable, their contained lineament gives them a sense of frozen anonymity and abstraction. Rather than actual possessions the contents seem to retain only the status of a metaphor of possession, rather than meaningful objects of personal affection. A whole variety of different perspective viewpoints are used, and often a sense of artifice is reinforced in these spaces - and we could argue that this is also part of the intended perversity that has adopted to deliberately undermine the lifestyle feigned by these faded utopias. It is this very ambiguity and questioning dissonance that makes it so interesting."
Mark Gisbourne
Kurschatten, 2018, vinyl, glitter on vintage photo, 7 x 10 cm
