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https://virtualresidency.p-10.ru/

In October I started an online Residency at VIRTUAL SPAR, St. Petersburg Art Residency. I’m currently writing a series of essays about my work during 2020.

The Inside of the Outside of the Inside – Drawings and Etchings

During my time at the “Cranach Stipendium”, as residency artist in Wittenberg this summer, I worked on two projects:

The “Two Sides” project described above and a project, in which referred to the place I stayed at:

 

A residency stipend experience always contains a mixture of different dimensions.

The first dimension is the reflection of the things I take with me, as a starting point and an inner concept – it’s the own world inside.

The second dimension is what I find. There can be preparation through research, but the original encounter is something absolutely different. It requires awareness – it’s the world outside.

The third dimension could be described as a synthesis between the inside and the outside, the space which is created out of the things I brought and the things I found. It is a new space of perception opening up and each of these new spaces is unique and precious.

The work I developed is a work about this connection of different spheres.

It consists of a series of drawings and prints.

The drawings:

1. In March and in April I drew different grids with pencil on paper. I always filled the whole sheet of paper. I guess this was also to some part lockdown meditation.

2. In August I translated the grid of the floor at the residency place, the former studio of Lucas Cranach, through drawings and folds into a spatial structure. The studio is the place in which the transformation process of an artwork take place. I decided to work with the ephemeral structures of the floor and translate them into possible spaces, somehow to give shape to the invisible components of the material space I physically moved in.

3. I transferred that spatial structure onto the grids. In a third step I combined both layers with drawings of   abstract sculptural constellations which I drew and photographed during my walks in Wittenberg: Coincidental findings, drapery, fragmented things which unintendedly looked like parts of installations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The prints:

1. I made etchings from the spatial drawings described above.
2. I combined them with drawings of sculptural findings.
3. I perforated the paper and added an irregular grid made of spring steel and magnets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://virtualresidency.p-10.ru/

In October I started an online Residency at VIRTUAL SPAR, St. Petersburg Art Residency. I’m currently writing a series of essays about my work during 2020.

 

 

In this post I would like to go back to works from about 10 or 15 years ago, which are keyworks for my work now, referring to the dioramas and objects I showed some days ago.

The work “Searching for a home” is one of my first works that included drawing into space. It contains topics of further concern: The observer’s spatial involvement, the fragmentary view on the world, loss of orientation and subjective structures for orientation, models of pictorial comprehension of world in interconnection between art historical tradition and contemporary subjective reflection like the cabinet of curiosities, the diorama and the panorama.

The images you see show a walkable panorama which invites the beholder to step on the platform where one finds him/herself in the center of a drawing.

The round drawing sketched on a paper web consists of a subjective choice of motif, narrative fragments and modular components of urban architecture, not from a panoramic view, but rather as a spatial face-to-face. It thereby becomes a sculptural work.

Additionally, the movement of the observer is limited to her/his own bodily movement; the motor which makes the outer round drawing go by the observer, is not directable at all nor is the arrangement of the cut out windowlike segments of the inner drawing, which open the view on the outer space. The observer only manages to direct her/his view, the order, the inner and outer drawing, which overlap each other and thereby the sequence of the mechanical film-like narrative elements.

The space is defined by objects, people, relations and the fiction that lies in between those dimensions.

 

Preceding my work with the panorama, the decision to enclose the movement of the observer was made by using paper webs to stage large-scale drawings. The complete drawing can only be realized from a distance, by approaching the details become visible, but the overall view disappears. The change of perspective and the thereby connected structural modification of the personal orientation as well as the blank space are factors which are necessary for my exposure to my works on and with the third dimension.

 

The installation “Cabinet” shows a modular interaction between drawings and objects made of welded steel. Both objects and drawings change their meaning according to the perspective from which they are perceived.

 

Both the dioramas which include light and shadow and the objects which get into dialogue with their surroundings, require motion and the change of perspective to be perceived in total. They so invite the beholder to get into dialogue with his/her own inner possible spaces.

 

TRANSLATIONS OF LONESOMENESS, IMAGES AND WORDS

 

https://virtualresidency.p-10.ru/

In October I started an online Residency at VIRTUAL SPAR, St. Petersburg Art Residency. I’m currently writing a series of essays about my work during 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can never tell anybody about how we really experience things. There is always a gap in between the words we use and how they are read by our vis a vis.

Words transport associations and memories, they are always translated and filtered individually. Artists use images, to articulate the specific space in between the words and the experience. The following drawings are accompanied by texts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image and text open up a space that grows in between the things you see and the things you read. The texts are corresponsive to the image and still contain their own spaces and connotations. While translating the written images into English, I thought a lot about translation processes and about the possible spaces that might open up for people from all over the world reading the texts. I thought a lot about how a written image might change its meaning depending on how it is read in different places, with different language and different culture. And if there is something like a core feeling which yet might be transported despite the translation processes. The relevance of articulation, translation and the invention of ways of showing and sharing both our work and our world as artists has become an important challenge during hardcore lockdown times and the enduring pandemic times. How can we develop ways of transporting the genuine feeling of art and art experience? How can we fulfill our destination as artists?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We need to talk about things that are important for us both as human beings and as artists and to make our artist worlds visible. That’s why this post is about the project which I started during hardcore lockdown times in April 2020. Each object, each thing, each thought becomes strange and questionable if you stare at it for a long time. And it seems to contain your own existence in a condensed way.

Facing pandemic times means facing yourself. Reflecting yourself, as an artist, as a human being, cocooned inside a clear, sterile and laboratory situation. A clear and precise view on things without depression. Things become whimsical. You begin to build constellations, stories and worlds out of almost nothing. The drawings and texts of the work “Mikroklima” are focused on this experience, without illustrating corona sceneries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The genre of the still life is the genre of lonesomeness. The drawings show whimsical still life scenes without any human beings, forming a microcosmic narrative by connecting images and aphoristic texts with a fragmented, poetic, laconic and ironic atmosphere. To me writing poetry is quite similar to making an installation:

A poem is like a spatial setting. The space is defined through the relationship between things/images and words. The reader/the beholder individually fills the missing links within the process of reading/dialogue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I made this work in April – I was supposed to be at an artist in residency place “Kunstarkaden Kempten” for one month. As could not go there in April I made a drawing and a text each day and sent them to the curatorial team there who installed them in the showcase of the studio space as a growing installation visible for the people passing by. I went for the residency two months later in June. I showed the drawings in real life, made a small DIY edition of the work.