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2019, Bailey Keogh - Untitled

Bailey Keogh (b. USA, 1992) is a painter who sources her work from a variety of online images, used as reference points for her traditional acrylic and oil paintings. Keogh’s work focuses on various elements of internet culture, building a bank of data from which she draws from in her painting.

Chain 1, and Chain 2 form a diptych where Keogh presents a similar set of two links in a chain. They are sketches from a chain necklace that belongs to the artist, which she wears along with small pendant lock, which forms a separate motif in the series. The first painting has a subtle treatment, resulting from a self-imposed restriction and using a minimal amount of paint on canvas. In the second work, Keogh develops the subject with freedom, employing higher contrast and vivid colors.

As the eyes of the viewer switch back from one painting to the other, Keogh’s intention of symbolizing technological progress as an aesthetic ideal is made clear. Keogh’s work is inspired by tech-related innovation, and the promises it holds. These gilded ideals are similar to those of the 1960s, when flying cars, robots, and deep space exploration seemed a distant reality.

2019, Caroline Wall - Untitled

Caroline Wall (b.Sweden, 1989) is a Swedish painter, based between Berlin and Malmö. Her paintings explore contrasting color palettes and organic movement. She studied Design and Visual Communication and holds a Masters in Psychology.

A landscape or a still life begins to emerge from the hazy shapes and gestures that Wall works into the canvas. Elements such as a cathedral, the beach, and a birthday cake become apparent in between strong red and blue lines. The more abstract watercolors blend into the soft white background of the laboriously gessoed canvas.

2019, Caroline Wall - Untitled

Caroline Wall (b.Sweden, 1989) is a Swedish painter, based between Berlin and Malmö. Her paintings explore contrasting color palettes and organic movement. She studied Design and Visual Communication and holds a Masters in Psychology.

This work invites the eye to feast on a mango-coloured canvas, littered with a sumptuous bounty of disparate visual elements - an upended glass, the head of a horse, an avocado, the flesh of an oyster, and the bones of a fish. Yet this highly abstracted work allows no purchase, and each element only exists for a moment before morphing into another. Carrying humor, and an element of the absurd the work is filled with a blossoming flower of boldly executed watercolor.

2019, Valentina Schumacher - Untitled

Valentina Schumacher is a visual artist who lives in Berlin. Her work is influenced by her experiences of living between Rome and Caracas. She reinvents the artefacts of daily life into obscure constructions, to create new visual symbioses between random placements of objects and vibrant colors, that become less recognisable to the naked eye.

This work shows a room constructed from pieces of different perspectives, spliced together to create a dimly lit scene. A vision of an angel-winged human presence looms over the painting, accompanied by a second figure almost invisible at first glance. A muted yet powerful palette of aegean blue, blood red, and yellow ochre, along with abstract and figurative elements, serve as the background before which a tense sequence unfolds, which turns the viewer into a witness.

2019, Valentina Schumacher - Untitled

Valentina Schumacher is a visual artist who lives in Berlin. Her work is influenced by her experiences of living between Rome and Caracas. She reinvents the artefacts of daily life into obscure constructions, to create new visual symbioses between random placements of objects and vibrant colors, that become less recognisable to the naked eye.

The viewer is thrust out of the room, and confronted with the outside world. A bright orange color suggests the sun rising over the horizon and the break of a new day. Among a mixture of expressionist brushstrokes, a mountain range, a nondescript building, a postbox and a human torso dominate this composition. When viewed in relation to the first work, the latter might reveal a motive, or even the corpus delicti, missing on the first painting. When seen by itself, the composition suggests something lighter. As elation rises in your chest, the viewer feels twinned with the naked torso standing in front of them.

2009, Johanna Diehl - DISPLACE

Johanna Diehl (b. 1977 Hamburg, Germany) is a Berlin-based artist and photographer. She studied photography and visual arts at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig under Prof. Timm Rautert, Boris Mikhailov and as a master student under Prof. Tina Bara, as well as at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris under Christian Boltanski and Jean-Marc Bustamante.

Her works have been shown at national and international exhibitions (Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg; UB Anderson Gallery Buffalo/NY; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Academy of Arts, Berlin; ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; Paris Photo, Grand Palais, Paris; Haus am Waldsee Berlin) and are included in the Collection of Contemporary Art held by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation for Photography and Art Studies, the DZ Bank Art Collection, the Bavarian State Painting Collections, and the Collection at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and others.

Since 1974 Cyprus has been separated. Until today, on both sides of the demarcation line, you find abandoned places, homes and deserted temples, that indicate the displacement of its former inhabitants. Especially the empty, converted and destroyed churches and mosques are demonstrators of the ethnical separation, of the replacement and absence of a community. The title ‘Displace’ stands both for ‘exile’ as well as ‘substitution’. It refers to the visible absence of the people from the photograph; the people, who had to leave their places of worships and their homes. On the other hand, it also describes the process of re-appropriation and the re-inscription by a different ethnic group, who has moved into the villages.

2018, Zac Craig - Untitled

Zac Craig is an Australian painter. He has lived and worked in Australia, France, Greece, Japan, and Germany. His abstract work is deeply powerful, making use of only hand mixed pigments to create complex compositions of distinct objects, diffuse forms and shades

The title of Zac Craig’s work refers directly to the dates which the artist spent conceiving, creating and finishing the work, a period of over two years. Craig’s oil paintings often have many different lives. Here we see gradients of color, from deeply intense shade of orange to subtle veins of gold.

Zac Craig suggests a whispered language or a story that plays out across his painting. There is a maternal quality to the work.

A vessel to hold, the amphora, dominates the lower half of this abstract work. The painting seems to be conceived in shallow relief, the elements existing at the surface while hand ground pigments allow the work its depth. These pigments give a huge variety of textures to the surface of the work, its formal properties strictly defined by the artist and relating to his broader oeuvre.

2019, Dorit Sirkes - GEIST

Dorit Sirkes is an Argentinian painter. She has lived and worked in Berlin for many years, after studying and making a career in Fine Arts across South America and Europe. She has lectured in painting and presided over several cultural institutions all around the world. Her work has been described as spectacular and arresting, and she has exhibited Argentina, Spain, Italy, Israel and Germany.

A vampire bat, angels, devils, mouths wide open screaming. Hellfire. These are but some of the elements present in Dorit Sirkes’ oil painting Geist, 2019. The renaissance composition suggested by the artist’s attention to the golden section is betrayed by a thoroughly contemporary approach to the subject. Think, a maelstrom of bodies whisked into a Rubens. In the top left-hand corner the clouds part and a suggestion of better weather is interrupted by a deformed horse, peasants’ shoes, and spidery spindly legs. The dominant colours, red and blue carve the canvas.

Sirkes’ mastery of texture is remarkable - flowing fabrics, fluffy clouds, and smooth flesh fuse in a harmonious way. The disembodied wings and hind quarters of a mythical creature are at the center of the composition, upon which human figures descend from the heavens onto the earth, while the color palette challenges the traditional biblical boundaries of purgatory.

2018, Sanna Laaban - PLEASE ENJOY IT WITH YOUR EYES ONLY

Sanna Laaban (b. Sweden, 1987) completed her MFA at Konstfack University of Arts, Craft & Design, Stockholm in 2018. Her bachelor included an exchange at Parsons the New School, New York. Sculpture has always been her main medium, accompanied by the occasional paintings and videos. Her work is often informed by everyday materials, objects and phenomena, transforming them in search of other potentials. She lives and works in Berlin.

Three strikingly light, blue and white sculptures conceived with two faces stand between 1.5 and 3 meters tall. These three doves, each describing a different moment in sequence of take off are stylistically reminiscent of Picassos’s sketches. Laaban’s work please enjoy it with your eyes only, (2018) draws a link between contemporary architecture and art history. Simultaneously floating and flightless, the wings of these birds are jewled with restrained preventative architecture, the kinds of metallic spikes that prevent pests from navigating or resting on buildings. Wrapping around the contours of the sculptures, these spikes, combined with the massive concrete weights attached to the base of the work give these seemingly carefree sculptures a darkly humorous twist.

2019, Juan Salazar - SUN

Juan Salazar (b. Venezuela, 1992) is a visual artist based in Berlin. The style of his paintings and collages varies from figurative to abstract, and focuses on topics such as memory and time, and how they relate to geographic and cultural displacement.

Sun was completed between the months of February and September, 2019. The work first consisted of an assembly of abstract images related to the Salazar’s place of birth, Venezuela - elements of landscapes, architecture, fauna, and flora, which were sourced from books, internet searches, and photographs the artist received from friends and family members. Upon completing this first composition, Salazar began to paint over individual elements systematically, simulating a whiteout, until only two of them remained, framed within a red rectangle: a bright, burning sun, and a row of black vertical lines, struck through with a white horizontal line at the top, which are reminiscent of palm trees, or the bars of a holding cell.

2019, Jonathan Ferguson - Untitled

Jonathan Ferguson (b. England, 1993) is a Berlin-based writer and designer.

A single mark rests upon a blank page. This slightly curved stripe resembles a bone, or charred wood, something aged, with a kind of elegance resting atop a blank paper entirely absent of all other mark. The artist is interested in the creative act of putting pen to paper - and traditionally, making the first mark is the hardest. This work is the first in a series of single lines on paper, each line representing a moment, or mood in the 8 hour working day. The series investigates the link between labour, creativity, and the repetitive gesture of mark making.

2019, Mauricio Sauma - SWING

Mauricio Sauma (b. Venezuela, 1991) is a photographer who lives and works in Berlin.

2019, Anna Reutinger - I’M WISE TO YOU, HONEY

Anna Reutinger (b. USA, 1991) lives and works in Berlin. Reutinger’s work advocates for a return to craft to propagate social, material and environmental empathy. In her sculptural and installation practice, she uses waste and found material to construct environments and situations. She received her M.F.A. in Dirty Art from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam (2016), and her B.A. in Design Media Arts and Digital Humanities from UCLA (2013). Her work has been exhibited at the Saint Etienne Biennale, FR; Jan van Eyck Academie, W139, De Fabriek, NL; KlaraKiss Zipspace, CH; Macao Milano, IT; The Hammer Museum, The Getty Center, The New Wight Gallery, Chin’s Push and Control Room, Los Angeles, US.

Built around a central chain, the artwork comprises a variety of found ephemera. Patchworked rabbit skins, jewellery, staring stained glass eyes, and carved wooden thumbs all hang from a found branch, to evoke traces of a human body. The branch itself suggests a hand reaching out to grasp, or to hold something out of our sight. At the base of the work, from the end of the chain, hangs a piece of shaped ceramic, resembling a human face. Inspired by Reutinger’s 2019 installation I’m wise to you, honey, the work suggests a mystical presence which forms a direct link between our world and that of magic.