Art by women in dialogue
The artists Jana Dettmer, Monika von Eschenbach, Anne Ruffert and Corinna Zielke worked together as a group for the show: "The female view of the world". The exhibition takes place in the space of KunstStücke art projects, Cologne - October 20th, 2022 to November 10th, 2022.
As career changers and autodidacts, the artists are united by a strong will to art. The different biographies of the artists are a guarantee for a varied artistic discourse. The way they engage is communicative; they openly invite viewers to respond. In dealing with her work, there is both, the possibility of aesthetic pleasure and the chance to better perceive oneself and the environment.
The exhibition concept expressly includes the participation of the viewers. From the old myth of the powerful artistic personality grows a partnership with the audience, in which art can be encountered on an equal footing in the truest sense. The four artists, each in their own way, show different possibilities of looking at the inner and outer world and thus perceiving it a bit more closely: differences in representation should not exclude, but make diversity visible and enable it.
The exhibition was created in cooperation with Artforum Culture Foundation (Thessaloniki), Winter Foundation Hamburg and the project 'Versöhnung der Werte' ('Reconciliation of Values'), Cologne.
A catalogue is published: The female view of the world. (c) ArtForum Editions
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
JANA DETTMER
Jana Dettmer, born in Braunschweig in 1965, is a commercial lawyer specializing in insolvency law. In addition to her successful career, she decides to study painting at the Free Art School in Cologne from 2013 to 2015 for personal reasons. Here she receives her necessary artistic skills.
Since 2015 she has been developing as an autodidact and takes the opportunity to work as an assistant with artists she knows and to deal even more intensively with questions and possibilities of painting. To this end, she works on projects with the cross-media artist Michael Jansen in Düsseldorf, who, among other things, has also created museum works together with Joseph Beuys. Another opportunity to get to know the studio work is with the painter and filmmaker Heinz Zolper, who himself worked with Andy Warhol at the famous Factory in NYC. Through her contacts with artists, she is encouraged to use her sense and sensitivity for the variety of psychological signals and to explore and convey the aesthetic, psychological and philosophical meanings of the colours in her paintings. Her strength is the abstract painterly expression. In the wide field of abstraction and colour painting, she finds her style primarily in the areas of monochrome, gestural and geometric abstraction. Stylistic models include the American Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman. From them she took over the claim not to separate the effect of the colour from its emotional and spiritual meaning elements. As a woman and contemporary artist, however, she expands the canon of her very personal view of the world for herself and the viewer.
MONIKA OF ESCHENBACH
Monika von Eschenbach, born 1965 in Eschenbach i.d. Oberpfalz, Bavaria, is an internationally active architect and was responsible for major projects in the USA, Switzerland and Germany, e.g. the crane houses and the Mediapark in Cologne and the Leipzig-Halle Airport.
Already during her architecture studies she dealt with free photography and sculptural works. In the 1980s she assisted the multimedia artist Michael Jansen and the conceptual photo artist Heinz-Günter Mebusch, to whom we owe e.g. the iconic portrait of Merit Oppenheim. In Switzerland and the USA she also learned art-immanent conceptual photography with the object maker and photo artist Vera Isler-Leiner. The artistic work of Monika von schenbach focuses on the phenomena of time, disappearance and the perception of different levels of reality. Her interests are especially in the topics of diversity and women's rights as essential elements of the necessary implementation of justice. In this sense, she is particularly committed to equality as a human right. With the example of the veiling of women in the Islamic world, she generally points to exclusion and unequal treatment. How necessary this demand really is, we can see within everyday life e.g. of women's shelters, abuse and exclusion in all social classes. At the political level, the Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe created an agreement on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Monika von Eschenbach has recognized the need for constant observation and discussion of this subject through art. The means she chooses as a photographic conceptual artist, painter and installation artist are unique and compelling.
ANNE RUFFERT
Anne Ruffert is an avid traveller, an observer of nature and the environment. Her observations and the collection of objects from the cycle of nature are the basis for creating art. At exhibitions and art fairs, her works arouse keen interest among collectors.
Environmental observation has found its way into modern art since Informel at the latest. It is again conspicuously present in contemporary art. Today, there is a new generation of artists whose work deals with environmental issues and problems such as global warming, biodiversity loss, and more generally the impact of humanity on the earth. It is about analyzing the network of relationships in the world and the dependencies it causes. It is important to note that “environment” and “nature” should not be confused. When Anne Ruffert dedicates herself to nature, it does not happen out of the romantic attitude of the 19th century, but in the conceptual context of the demand for the preservation of our earth, mother earth, which we, as her children, are obliged to treat with care.
CORINNA ZIELEKE
Corinna Zielke, born in the Lüneburg Heath, northern Germany, has been living in the south of Cologne for many years, where she runs a psychotherapeutic practice. The preoccupation with art first arose at the beginning of the millennium from the attempt to find a balance to her difficult psychotherapeutic work. At the same time, she is pursuing the long-cherished desire to develop her artistic talent she discovered in her childhood furtheron professionally. In 2003 she began studying at the art academy in Bad Reichenhall with the Austrian painters Gerhard Almbauer and Robert Zielasco. She was inspired by both teachers and developed a light painterly style, creating cosmic landscapes that testify to the merging of being with the unconscious. Through the technically brilliant colour compositions of her paintings and graphics, the artist impressively conveys to the attentive viewer an idea of real emotional worlds and abstract landscape sensations.
The artist creates her own unmistakable language for dealing with being a stranger, with loneliness and the search for pure form, with which she can authentically express her feelings and ideas. She tries her hand at experimental art techniques, uses classic fine oil painting, and experiments with colours and stains. In paint pours, she deliberately manipulates the random colour gradient and manages to convey almost floating states, not unlike Wolfgang Tilmans' color experiments in the field of photography. Through her art, she succeeds in genuinely expanding her experience. This is a way to her, to learn better understanding the material world as well as personal states of mind. She develops a feeling for really seeing in-between worlds. Always new, she manages in an impressive way to capture the actually incomprehensible of feeling in pictures.
PM - SM
INVITATION TO THE VERNISSAGE
10/20/2022, 6:30 p.m
Introductory words: Sabine Klement
Exhibition: 10/20 - 11/10/2022
KunstStücke art projects
Stammheimer Strasse 15
50735 Cologne
Telephone: 0221 977 12 600
Email: contact@janadettmer.com