GROUP SHOW |

Nathalie Noé Adam | Viki Mladenovski | Nina Gross | Anne-Sophie Loos | Julie Wagener | 

29.06.23 – 22.07.23

·       Nina Gross

Nina Gross's artistic practice deals with anthropology and questions how we relate to the objects of our daily lives. Banal and obvious objects, such as forks and spoons, are isolated from the context of their cultural use and translated into small paintings. Like another film, it stops the narrative and routine in which they are used. The economical brush strokes allude to Alex Katz and reflect the strength of painting to represent textures and surfaces.

Observation, drawing and the photographic eye attract objects to still life. The distance allows their story to emerge and transforms kitchen tools into fragmented, more abstract images. It triggers our association for the meaning of things depends on their use. In this sense, kitchen tools can have ambiguous uses depending on the intentions of the users. The knife, for example, can be both a domestic and a dangerous tool.

Bathroom scenes explore washing routines and activities that are visible in the mirror but physically incompatible. He wonders where the illusion begins and what element of the image can be taken for real. Love relation of hate depicts the between the space of the soap and the water tap. Both cannot be used with each other near.

Cakes and steak are asparagus from Dialoge yith Degas and focus on the allocations that change over time.

Therefore, the steak changed said meaning from an essential food for u ancestors to an apocalypse bringing today's consumer goog.

·       Viki Mladenovski 

As a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator, Viktoria Mladenovski works primarily with oil pastels, ceramics, textiles and digital media. Mundane surroundings and themes hold a dreamlike quality in Viktoria's art. They anthropomorphise objects and change animals or humans into their own fantasy creatures by distorting and combining different elements.

Queerness and feminism inform Viktoria's art practice. Viktoria questions how female bodies are perceived and visualises body dysmorphia through the broken body parts that can be found within their work. Places within their paintings become distorted, receiving an eerie and fantastical quality.

Their art is a joyful and playful escapism from reality, oftentimes whimsical and containing surreal elements. Themes that they explore in their art are memory and (dis)connection to/from their identity, gender and the world.

·       Julie Wagener 

In her work, Julie Wagener is interested in the construction of the Selbst-Verständnis (Self-understanding) of the 21st century individual: the contextualization of existence, the fabrication of identity and the appropriation of meaning. In this context, it is the loneliness, the feelings of distress, abandonment, and alienation of the individual in the face of our society that are central to the artist's painting. 

The individual is faced with a reality that is difficult to define and consequently not easy to live with. The result is a society stunned by the magnitude of the global situation and its geopolitical, economic, and environmental crises, which provokes emotional detachment, apathy, feelings of powerlessness and disorientation. The inability or impossibility to change or adapt to the existing conditions imposed by the system leads to alienation and identity conflicts. Existential anguish arises from trying to understand one's reality or just managing one's daily life.

Depression, burn-out, insomnia and anxiety disorders and suicide always face a huge social stigma. Experienced by the masses but most often suffered alone, symptoms of exhaustion, isolation or despair remain signs of weakness in a system that glorifies the successful, active and engaged individual. The persistent taboo within society reinforces the feeling of guilt and loneliness among those concerned and thus blocks the way to empathy, dialogue and acceptance. Despite the absence of any aggressive or agitated elements, even bordering on an area of calm and innocence, the depicted scenes evoke an underlying violence - an unease that is reflected in the pale, almost corpse-like skin tones. Combined with the white fabric, the paintings evoke death and the disintegration of the living body. Alongside these symbols, emptiness takes hold and becomes an integral element of the composition.

·       Anne-Sophie Loos 

Working in her studio, Anne-Sophie Loos processes her personal experiences and therefore her emotions. Working on her detailed images allows her to experience moments of perfect concentration and silence that soothe her thoughts.

The inspiration for your work comes from memories of specific moments in their lives. Numerous visits to museums as a child and a fascination with the draperies in huge Renaissance paintings led to her own works in which Anne-Sophie attempts to capture light and shadow in silk oil canvases.

The 'Moments' series comes from a memory of Impressionist works depicting a rigid object at different times of the day. Anne-Sophie's aim is not so much to research and analyse the exact works of well-known artists, but to use her memory of what she has seen to create her own works and motifs.

"Moments" depicts a silk canvas that is exposed differently at different times of the day, as if by sunlight. The result are snapshots that produce a certain relationship of light and shadow that cannot be reproduced in the same way in this form. In this way, something immobile seems to change as a result of external influences, giving rise to something new, but without really changing. Just as situations in our daily lives are experienced and evaluated differently by different states of mind, without changing in their actual form.

• Nathalie Noé Adam

Visual artist Nathalie Noé Adam was born in Luxembourg in 1980. After studying at the Beaux Arts in Marseille and at the UDK in Berlin, she left to refine her knowledge of engraving in Brussels, then moved to Montreuil. She took part in a few Parisian exhibitions, including Première vue au Passage de Retz, and moved back to the German capital where she lived and worked for seven years. She exhibits, among others, at the Kulturfoum and the Haus am Lützowplatz. Drawing takes a central place in the artist's work. She also began collaborations with artists using other mediums. Thus was born for example the performance Molecular-Landscape (2016, Chateau de Bourglinster, Luxembourg) in trio with the musician Raol Gomez and the dancer João Costa or the current video project The Slot of Gaia whose first video, Ode to Mud, is a collaboration with the actress Pascale Noé Adam and the second part, The Galeras fantasy, is a co-direction with the Colombian visual artist, Edwin Cuervo. She initiates inter-disciplinary projects and moves from the solitary workshop to the active volcanoes of Colombia and then to the theatre scenes to create colorful scenographies. Currently N.N.A lives and works between Marseille and Luxembourg. It is the initiative of the Antidote Fiction group exhibition project that will be shown in Luxembourg as part of Esch Capitale de la Culture Européenne 2022. His works have been shown at the Beijing Biennale, the Neumünster Cultural Centre in Luxembourg and the barbican art center in London.