Artist Statement
2015
My practice deals with memory and personal past with notions of loss and longing. I create paintings that show the interpretations of my memories in an abstract way, displaying my personal past and my attempt to understand the essence of my father (who passed away when I was an infant). For this I investigate old family photographs and my memories of the house I grew up in, where my father also lived before he passed away. In the process, I try to remember certain furniture we had or the interior of a room from that home, as well as places that I saw while growing up in Berlin. I am drawn to moments and rooms, which are permanently impressed in my mind and compare these with the family photographs.
In my research, I am particular interested in the objects and furniture from the time of my father. Objects and furniture tell something about the people that bought and occupied them. They tell about their era and give us a look at the taste, fashion, social trends and the circumstances in which the owners lived. By painting my family’s furniture, I try to discover their essence, their personality and their history “as if style of furniture, the manner of décor and arrangement, were some language to be interpreted” (Maurice Halbwachs, Space and the Collective Memory). Eventually I am trying to understand my own past. ‘To strengthen our sense of self the past needs to be rescued and made accessible’ (Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place).
2014
My practice is a very personal one. I take my inspiration mainly from my own feelings, dreams, memories and put these into paintings. I shift from bright and hopeful paintings, depicting my longing for openness and freedom, to dark and pensive ones, exploring my fears and nightmares. The two different sides show the split in my own unconscious. The dreaming and the longing battling against the unknown and anxiety created by city life. Therefore I am very much interested in the unconscious and the inner world, as I believe there are many great things that can be discovered. Painting, I believe, provides a great tool to explore ones own unconscious and hidden feelings. I hope by painting my own inner world, that others can relate, can feel something too. I like to compare it with reading Haruki Murakami's strange stories. I feel a great sense of exploring my unconscious when I read his books. It opens the reader up to accept different levels of reality. I wish to do so with my paintings.
2013 / 14
In my practice I explore the notion of longing, dreaming and the uncanny. I paint abstract shapes resembling buildings and spaces to create illusions of surreal worlds taken from dreams and memories. With my paintings I want to evoke feelings and emotions in the spectator.
The series of paintings with a bright blue line representing the sky are depicting a longing for open spaces like deserts, taken from my memories of Utah. The rectangular shapes in the paintings represent ordinary buildings, like supermarkets or convenience stores in America; while the other elements represent streets, concrete or desert plains. Particularly the colour palette I use for the buildings reappears in almost every painting. This colour scheme best represents America for me. It reflects security and warmth; in contrast the blue sky reflects freedom and endlessness. The overall feeling of these paintings is open and vast, giving room for imagination: a distance; a far away building; a long ride. Living in a hectic and condensed city like London, this urge for freedom and openness builds up inside of me. It creates dreams of breaking free. On the other hand it can create the opposite - nightmares. Me running around without being able to escape, getting lost, slipping into a different world. As I was not born and raised in London, I never quite feel at home here which also has an impact on my paintings. I often feel alienated and like I don't belong here - unknown spaces preventing me from finding inner peace. In my recent paintings I used much darker colours than before. The bright blue sky has disappeared and my buildings and spaces are floating in the open universe or in a dreamworld. The floating shapes can't really be identified by the spectator. They seem to represent something they have seen before but can't define. For me they are segments of my memories and imagination. The walls of the spaces and buildings are leading the spectator to the unknown.
More and more I focus my attention on dreams, as they show my deepest feelings. I wake up in the morning and I know I dreamed something tense but all I remember is a feeling, that feeling I try to recreate again with my paintings. To store it, to remember it, maybe even to understand it. I especially got fascinated with Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes when I went to see an exhibition of his work alongside paintings by Rothko in the Pace Gallery in London at the end of 2012. I was struck with the simplicity of the images and the impact it had on me. This was a huge inspiration to me and gave me confidence to explore simple shapes and colours creating moods and feelings. Around the same time I started reading Haruki Murakami and his book Dance Dance Dance which created a desire inside of me to extensively explore density in my paintings. The darker shades of colours, the uncanny settings and the sense of getting lost. The sentence “I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel,”(Murakami,1994, p.1) got stuck in my head. It resonated with me and I had to draw the room where one of the characters of the book, the Sheep Man, lives.
As an artist I will keep exploring the unconscious and the dream world. The uncanny and its beauty. The power of abstract shapes, forms and colours.
2015
My practice deals with memory and personal past with notions of loss and longing. I create paintings that show the interpretations of my memories in an abstract way, displaying my personal past and my attempt to understand the essence of my father (who passed away when I was an infant). For this I investigate old family photographs and my memories of the house I grew up in, where my father also lived before he passed away. In the process, I try to remember certain furniture we had or the interior of a room from that home, as well as places that I saw while growing up in Berlin. I am drawn to moments and rooms, which are permanently impressed in my mind and compare these with the family photographs.
In my research, I am particular interested in the objects and furniture from the time of my father. Objects and furniture tell something about the people that bought and occupied them. They tell about their era and give us a look at the taste, fashion, social trends and the circumstances in which the owners lived. By painting my family’s furniture, I try to discover their essence, their personality and their history “as if style of furniture, the manner of décor and arrangement, were some language to be interpreted” (Maurice Halbwachs, Space and the Collective Memory). Eventually I am trying to understand my own past. ‘To strengthen our sense of self the past needs to be rescued and made accessible’ (Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place).
2014
My practice is a very personal one. I take my inspiration mainly from my own feelings, dreams, memories and put these into paintings. I shift from bright and hopeful paintings, depicting my longing for openness and freedom, to dark and pensive ones, exploring my fears and nightmares. The two different sides show the split in my own unconscious. The dreaming and the longing battling against the unknown and anxiety created by city life. Therefore I am very much interested in the unconscious and the inner world, as I believe there are many great things that can be discovered. Painting, I believe, provides a great tool to explore ones own unconscious and hidden feelings. I hope by painting my own inner world, that others can relate, can feel something too. I like to compare it with reading Haruki Murakami's strange stories. I feel a great sense of exploring my unconscious when I read his books. It opens the reader up to accept different levels of reality. I wish to do so with my paintings.
2013 / 14
In my practice I explore the notion of longing, dreaming and the uncanny. I paint abstract shapes resembling buildings and spaces to create illusions of surreal worlds taken from dreams and memories. With my paintings I want to evoke feelings and emotions in the spectator.
The series of paintings with a bright blue line representing the sky are depicting a longing for open spaces like deserts, taken from my memories of Utah. The rectangular shapes in the paintings represent ordinary buildings, like supermarkets or convenience stores in America; while the other elements represent streets, concrete or desert plains. Particularly the colour palette I use for the buildings reappears in almost every painting. This colour scheme best represents America for me. It reflects security and warmth; in contrast the blue sky reflects freedom and endlessness. The overall feeling of these paintings is open and vast, giving room for imagination: a distance; a far away building; a long ride. Living in a hectic and condensed city like London, this urge for freedom and openness builds up inside of me. It creates dreams of breaking free. On the other hand it can create the opposite - nightmares. Me running around without being able to escape, getting lost, slipping into a different world. As I was not born and raised in London, I never quite feel at home here which also has an impact on my paintings. I often feel alienated and like I don't belong here - unknown spaces preventing me from finding inner peace. In my recent paintings I used much darker colours than before. The bright blue sky has disappeared and my buildings and spaces are floating in the open universe or in a dreamworld. The floating shapes can't really be identified by the spectator. They seem to represent something they have seen before but can't define. For me they are segments of my memories and imagination. The walls of the spaces and buildings are leading the spectator to the unknown.
More and more I focus my attention on dreams, as they show my deepest feelings. I wake up in the morning and I know I dreamed something tense but all I remember is a feeling, that feeling I try to recreate again with my paintings. To store it, to remember it, maybe even to understand it. I especially got fascinated with Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes when I went to see an exhibition of his work alongside paintings by Rothko in the Pace Gallery in London at the end of 2012. I was struck with the simplicity of the images and the impact it had on me. This was a huge inspiration to me and gave me confidence to explore simple shapes and colours creating moods and feelings. Around the same time I started reading Haruki Murakami and his book Dance Dance Dance which created a desire inside of me to extensively explore density in my paintings. The darker shades of colours, the uncanny settings and the sense of getting lost. The sentence “I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel,”(Murakami,1994, p.1) got stuck in my head. It resonated with me and I had to draw the room where one of the characters of the book, the Sheep Man, lives.
As an artist I will keep exploring the unconscious and the dream world. The uncanny and its beauty. The power of abstract shapes, forms and colours.