Galerie Fenna Wehlau - Art Karlsruhe 2023

Bettina Bürkle (1961) 'sliding objects'

Since Bettina Bürkle's residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris in the late 1990s, she has created works that refer to the window as an iconographic point of departure; the window embodies the themes of light and space, connects inside and outside, the experience of a real and an imagined space.

Subsequently, the artist began to work with the material acrylic glass, which is transparent. The 'sliding objects' enable the superimposition of colour and depth dimensions in order to render shifting chromatic qualities, light refractions and shadows perceptible.

Transparency and density create an interplay of openness and closedness, of surface and space. Light and its immateriality play a special role in that its reflection creates spatiality. A mysterious radiance emanates from the edges of individual panes. The viewers are invited to change their position and move around in order to seize the spatial appearance of the objects or installations.

Rupert Eder (1968) painting

Rupert Eder is a painter who creates vibrantly coloured oil paintings and watercolours that oscillate between minimalist and complex forms and structures. He understands painting as a spiritual process that cannot be expressed by anything other than painting itself.

He is inspired by observations of light and nature,  made especially on journeys to the French Atlantic coast, where he paints watercolours en plein air. But he also likes to work in hotel rooms in the big metropolises such as London or New York and in his light-flooded studio in Dießen on the Ammersee. His brightly coloured watercolours are created in a process of experimentation. He uses different papers as source material and allows himself to be surprised by their properties. As a result of a so-called erratic coincidence, he comes up with new and enigmatic pictorial ideas that captivate the viewer.

For his works on canvas, Rupert Eder uses complex colour mixtures of oil and a variety of pigments, which he flares out in long swathes and sweeping strokes with sculptural brushwork. From the depth of the painting, the colours shine both richly and opaquely as well as in translucent blends. The oil paintings describe an almost energetic pictorial space and seem to expand across the canvas. They are never static in their chromatic intensity and formal language, always moving and fragmented.

Ingo Fröhlich (1966) paperworks / drawings

The world is explained to Ingo Fröhlich through drawing. To him, the exciting thing is to see the path, the artistic process of creation. The transformations that the work goes through along with the artist, as it were, and thus also brings the artist to a different inner place. Drawing is complex. An idea in the mind takes shape through the movement of the hand on the paper. His drawings emerge in a rhythmic process. Stroke by stroke, line by line, they fill the surface, describe movement, time and the space in between.

For Ingo Fröhlich, drawing is not about perfection. It is about the working process, about steps, a wandering, a progression. When he studies nature in different landscapes, he discovers new strokes and lines, a different nature, a different climate and a different space.

Nature, a different climate and a different sense of being. A place and his perception of it are connected. Drawing is perception. What is special in being on the road are the many impressions that are new and unfamiliar. This sharpens perception. In an unfamiliar environment, Ingo Fröhlich is instinctively more alert, more attentive.

Sheila Furlan (1974) silk objects

Translucent silk as a material allows Sheila Furlan to express herself in a subtle language. It offers the viewer glimpses into inaccessible interstices and the inner spaces of the objects, sculptures and installations and creates a dialectical interplay between inside and outside, space and volume.

The most recent wall objects are metal frames covered with fragile silk, which contain additional silk partitions in their interior. The artist fills these newly opened planes with her own thoughts. Nature is an important source for her in this process. Hand-stitched fragments of images and texts are embroidered into the fabric. The texts are often notes, thoughts that grow into the spaces.

The two-piece work 'Tiefenebenen', for example, is reduced to the colours of black and white. In it, one can immerse oneself in silence, sink to the bottom of a lake - catch a glimpse of the gentle surface of the water - timelessness - connectedness, long threads hanging down as connections or extensions. Sheila Furlan seeks to capture the sensitive fabric of nature. The process of perceiving takes on an important role. Depending on the point of view, the works change and reveal a different vantage point.

Margit Hartnagel (1970) painting

In painting, Margit Hartnagel increasingly finds a sense of ease in which everything that was previously excluded is now allowed to enter. She lets herself be exposed to the surface of the painting. She allows herself to become herself part of the picture. Who or even what is this "I" that places itself in the picture?

The artist perceives pulsating vitality. Joy, love and tenderness. Strength and creative power. Femininity and softness. Presence and infinite expanse. And the desire to let drops of paint fall softly onto the wet surface of the painting.

And the joy of observing how the open ground gives support to the falling drops. And the happiness felt when colour is able to expand and take its space. And the love that flows to create a feeling togetherness. A togetherness in which the individual remains autonomous and yet, or precisely because of this, connects with the other 'DOTS' to form a whole. And the gratitude to recognise the whole as LIFE, as a living process, as creative power that has become painting.

Eberhard Ross (1959) painting

One central element of Eberhard Ross' work is the search for tranquillity in the midst of an accelerated world. His paintings are meant to be points of pause. In music there is an equivalent in compositional technique, the "fermata". A series of works is therefore also called "fermata". Music is an essential component and companion of his work processes. The artist seeks to hear colours and to see sound.

He has recently added the series of works "on the nature of daylight", which is dedicated to the fascinatingly subtle colour transitions of the colours of the sky. All his works are created in a deep state of calm. Eberhard Ross is happy when this calm radiates back into the room from the paintings and has an effect on humans.

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection. We respond to beauty with emotion.
 (...) all work is about beauty; all positive work represents and celebrates it. all negative art protests the lack of beauty in our lives (...)'

The above quote by the Canadian painter Agnes Martin formulates exactly the basis on which Eberhard Ross works. With his painting, he wants to open up the possibility for the viewer to encounter himself and to take pleasure in it.

Ulrike Seyboth (1970) painting

Many of Ulrike Seyboth's pictures are created while travelling. On the move, during study visits, in foreign, unfamiliar work environments. They are her diary. The artist explores in painterly terms how the outside world is reflected in her. Entire cycles of paintings are created in this way.

During her studies, she went to Salamanca in Spain for half a year. Then followed extensive explorations through Europe, South America and North Africa, in places like Algeria and the Sahara. In Iceland, she was able to work in a studio in the Westfjords, 200 kilometres from Greenland!

Ulrike Seyboth has lived in France for twenty years, first in Paris, then in Bourgogne and finally, since three months, in Sète, on the Mediterranean. She never seeks to be restless and constantly on the road, but to spend a prolonged period of time in one place. It is the light, the smells, the sounds, the silence, the landscapes, the people that inspire her. The canvases, papers and collages are the bearers of her experiences. Back in her Berlin studio, they provide her with an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Ulrike Seyboth begins the process of working on a painting without knowing where it will lead. Painting is an adventure! She is interested in reinventing the basic artistic vocabulary again and again, in questioning the boundaries of painting anew. The creative process with an unknown result confronts her with her self, with the necessity of constantly exploring herself anew and, at best, coming to know herself.

Stephan Wurmer (1956) wooden sculptures

Since 1990, Stephan Wurmer has worked almost exclusively with the medium of wood, which allows him the necessary contact with nature in its versatility such as in structure and malleability, resistance and naturalness. His sculptures often derive their dynamism and tension from the combination of two opposing approaches in the interplay of determination and expressive openness.

Last year, after a prolonged interruption, the artist created several steel sculptures for outdoor spaces again, which show references to the wooden sculptures in terms of both content and form.