MORITZ RIESENBECK

In Moritz Riesenbeck’s artistic work, we are confronted with the ephemeral. The artist develops site-specific and temporary interventions that focus on social, cultural or even individual traces in places and objects and make these atmospherically tangible as symbols of contemporary phenomena.
How physical can absence be? How present is a blank space?

As traces of the past, they point beyond their negative and convey narratives, emotions and temporality. In the same way, places and objects are carriers of identity, culture and sociality – even beyond the time of their functional use. They describe temporal and spatial states, mental and emotional processes, physical moments – they describe reality. Moritz Riesenbeck uses these traces as a transmitter of events. His artworks are primarily site-specific or site-bound, temporary interventions. From the very first moment, a transience is inscribed in them, because his works lose their context or even their existence beyond the place for which they were conceived. They are temporary installations that involve the viewer and can be experienced by the senses, which on the one hand emphasize the historicity of a place and on the other hand transfer atmospheric experiences into a space and initiate processes of consciousness. Time and place are thus two important protagonists on Moritz Riesenbeck’s stages.

HANNA KUSTER

Hanna Kuster’s works radiate an enormous amount of energy and in many ways push the boundaries. The painter moves freely and powerfully between figuration and abstraction. Her already remarkable oeuvre creates a very dense visual world from a multitude of very different pictorial objects with personal references, which we can explore. Hanna Kuster studied in Düsseldorf with Siegfried Anzinger and Tomma Abts.

What Hanna Kuster offers us are pictorial worlds of a playful character, which do not provide us with concrete narratives, but instead encourage us to explore them ourselves, to perceive them in an equally playful and pleasurable way. It is possible that the arrangements of the most diverse motifs and objects, whose contexts remain open to us, are references to or relics of personal stories behind what is depicted. Perhaps it is our good fortune to fill what we see with our associations, memories and stories.

KYOUNGHYUN MIN

“I feel the commonality with many digital bodies that are imitated again and again. Perhaps it is because the ‘uncanny valley’ that they form immediately explains the ‘uncanny valley’ that I myself face as a body in the multicultural age […]. As an Asian woman, I am not a complete Asian identity, but a mixture of many Western heritages. In my experience, many of the cultures I encountered in my childhood had a high proportion of absolute Western culture. The food I eat, the clothes I wear and all the places I visit absolutely cannot be defined as a single culture. I am no longer a person with a single identity, but I have an identity mixed with many imitated heritages. On the one hand, the mixed body describes the current ecosystem very precisely. At this point we imitate ‘other beings’, and again ‘other beings’ imitate us, and we describe the world by constantly reproducing it. I want to bring them into the art space with all my eyes and keep them in an infinite form for constant observation.
I want to keep wandering through the uncanny valley that you can never avoid. This is not an optimistic attitude, but an absolute observation, an act of excavation. All cultures are born from excavations.” – Quote from the artist

EMIL WALDE

In Emil Walde’s works, we are confronted with new spaces of perception, which the artist creates by appropriating and transforming existing materials, situations and contexts and whose experience sensitizes our view of everyday social mechanisms.

Space has undergone many paradigm shifts in its definition. From perception as indeterminate and abstract to a cultural variable constituted by social phenomena and contexts. The relationship between space and art as well as the differentiation between general space and specific place has also been given various accents; in addition, the experience of space – both personal and collective – has been questioned. In his 1967 essay On Other Spaces, Michel Foucault develops the model of “counter-places”, “utopias actually realized”, and refers to them as “heterotopias”. Emil Walde also conceives “other places” in the Foucauldian sense: by appropriating existing materials and situations and transforming their current representation into a more general context, he creates spaces of perception that expose the illusionary mechanisms of the existing and provide new potential for thought. “By formalizing existing elements, I create a sensitized view of the environment. This opens up the possibility of questioning assumptions through an everyday lens. This interaction is fundamental to my work,” says the artist.

PHILIPP NAUJOKS

Philipp Naujoks is an artist beyond easy categorization, a draughtsman, painter and conceptual artist. His pictures, which the artist creates using light as a tool through photochemical processes, are intensely atmospheric and poetic. Philipp Naujoks, who studied under Franka Hörnschemeyer in Düsseldorf, also produces conceptually designed sculptural objects, which are sometimes staged as installations in an ongoing development.

In an earlier text on Philipp Naujoks, his author Pia Bendfeld describes his art “as a plea for the sensuality of the technical” – a statement that aptly describes the core of Naujoks’ art.
Philipp Naujoks resolves a supposed contradiction between the technical creation of a work and the exploration of the relationship between technology and artistic image-making. The technology remains invisible as a result. But what it produces remains. It is sensuality and emotion.