Michael Kalmbach, Nadja Schöllhammer, Caro Suerkemper – Kommt leis die Nacht
Arbeiten auf Papier und Skulptur/Works on paper and sculpture

16. Juli – 3. September 2016/July 15 – September 3, 2016

Info

Our Summer Exhibition unites watercolours and etchings by Michael Kalmbach, pencil and ink drawings with Nadja Schöllhammer and sculptures by Caro Suerkemper. Diverse nuances connect all three, with their expressions ranging from the fantastic to the traumatic and explore the tensions between beauty and eeriness, innocence and guilt, curiosity and fear. The night gives our artists the artistic freedom and space to imagine an atmosphere of playful naivety; graceful, sensual and yet whimsical.

Michael Kalmbach was born 1962 in Landau, Germany. He studied at the Städelschule Frankfurt a. M., Germany and his work is represented in the collections of the MMK Frankfurt a. M., Germany and the Kupferstichkabinett of the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland et al. Michael’s watercolours deal primarily with the subject of childhood and the depiction of the big and the small. He creates his fragile figures starting from blurs of paint, his watercolour technique oscillating between melancholy and the grotesque to masterful weightlessness. The unpredictable and the dissolution of shapes correspond with experiences of the night, elusive and random. Since 2013 Michael Kalmbach has been creating drypoint etchings which have the appearance of paintings.

Female beings in a state of rapture and ecstasy are the motif of the sculptures of ceramic, plaster, aluminium and bronze created by the artist Caro Suerkemper. Caro was born in 1964 in Stuttgart, Germany and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, Germany. Her work is represented in the collections of the MMK Frankfurt a. M., Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, et al. In 2013 she was an awardee of the Marianne Werefkin Prize. As an artist, Caro brings the sensual world of Baroque into the present. She models her characters with delight, to experiment with an intensely provocative physicality and living movement compositions. On a potbelly stove made of gypsum, women writhe in an erotic game, in which exaggerated expressions and mental absence coexist. Deliberately bordering on the kitsch, irony unfolds raising questions about authenticity and the staging of the emotional world.

Nadja Schöllhammer was born in Esslingen am Neckar, Germany. She studied at the University of Arts Berlin and the UdK Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts). She was the winner of the art prize of the Förderverein Balmoral 03 e. V/Künstlerhauses Schloss Balmoral, Germany and her work is represented in the collection of the European Patent Office Munich and the China Academy of Arts, Hangzhou/China et al. Nadja is well known for her large-scale three-dimensional installations of paper and cut-out drawings. More recently though, during her residence at the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany 2015 and 2016, increasingly pure large-format pencil drawings have appeared in her work: out of a dense network of vibrant strokes and lines shapes and beings emerge. These beings seem to be in perpetual transition. Stimulated through her preoccupation with the rites and myths of other cultures, her world of motifs opens up the space of the night, both the dreamlike and the nightmarish.

PresseEcho

Der Tagesspiegel, Mehr Berlin, Caro Suerkemper

Biography by request