About

Approach

A holistic understanding of art that seeks to connect diverse artistic techniques, ways of thinking and perceiving, philosophical structures and views – without any claim to finality, and aware that the whole becomes visible in the part, and the relative in the whole.

In practice this means there is no fixed order in which a work has to come about. A drawing can prepare a painting, a sound a drawing, a sentence read in passing an entire group of works. The techniques remain permeable to one another.

… but in the experience that no representation is sufficient, absolute, definitive. The unrepresentable, the sublime, can only be alluded to, and the impossibility of its presentation can only be felt … for in the multitude of realisations: no work of art is the work of art, no style the style, no approach the approach. All creation moves on a ground of nihilism and in a space of open-ended potentiality.

Wolfgang Welsch, “Ästhetisches Denken” (translated)

What emerges is not understood as a conclusion but as a state: a point in a process that could just as well continue.

What can be perceived and what reveals itself are basic principles of the living, of space, of sound, of resonance, of connection, of finding form.

Method

The work is made in series and over long periods of time. Drawing and painting stand side by side as equals: drawing – charcoal, chalk and pigment on paper – stands on its own.

Sound often comes first: a noise, a voice or a rhythm provides the impulse from which a drawing or painting emerges.

Many works stay in the studio for months and are taken up again. A painting is finished the moment it no longer claims anything it does not show by itself.

Education

Studies and years of training between Bonn, Poznań, Cologne and Moscow:

• Alanus University, Bonn / AlfterPainting and graphic art
• Academy of Fine Arts, Poznań, PolandGraphic art
• Werkschule KölnPainting
• Boris Birger, MoscowDrawing (private studies)

Solo and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad.

Press

Studio

The studio is at Lessingstraße 4 in Cologne-Ehrenfeld. All works are made here.

Visits are possible by appointment, including to see individual works in the original.

Photos: former studio