LOOKING AHEAD

Six artists from five countries – opening at Parktheater Iserlohn on 15.01.2023 at 11 am.

Welcome: Niels Gamm
Introduction: Werner Ewest

In the fall of 2021, the idea for this exhibition was born. Corona ruled the country, the cultural scene was largely paralyzed. Nobody knew how things would continue and what restrictions were still to come. And the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis could not even be guessed at.

The “look ahead” is highly varied and extremely differentiated among the 6 artists. It shows us our own possibilities from contemplative immersion to escape into visionary pictorial worlds, from construction and retreat into worlds all our own to the realization that everything we see in the direction of the future is a result of our own socialization, to apocalyptic visions of a world without people and, in contrast, the optimism of plump joie de vivre. From each of these artistic positions we can derive principles that can also apply to each of us in one way or another.

As different as the different artists’ view of the future may be, almost all of the works are of great intensity and many are downright colorful. In the rooms of the Park Theater, the nearly 60 works create an exciting atmosphere and invite visitors to take an extended art tour before the performances and during the intermissions.

The Bengelsträter Gallery, which has been staging exhibitions in the Parktheater for almost 30 years, has curated this exhibition especially for the space, and in the process is also showing 4 artists who have not yet been seen in Iserlohn.

About the individual artists:

Katarzyna Cudnik,

Born 1971 in Gdynia, Poland. Studied art first in Gdansk, Poland, then at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, first with Graubner and then with Anzinger, whose master student she is. Lives and works in Düsseldorf. The Graubner student explores the reinterpretation of landscape through light and color, creating her own pictorial reality as a kind of timelessness and universe. She herself says, “My artistic endeavor is to spread the color on a surface and place this surface in space” . Her view forward is contemplative and timeless, she has found the subject in which she has found exceptional craftsmanship, the handling of color.

Isa Dahl,

Born in Ravensburg in 1965. Studied art first in Stuttgart with Peter Grau and Erich Mansen, then at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Peter Krieg, whose master student she is. She lives and works in the Stuttgart region. She makes the canvas pulsate, her paintings are pure movement, she lets us speculate about the materiality and texture of her works and in the end she takes us into eerily beautiful worlds full of power and color intensity, abysmal and mysterious. Her view forward is that everything flows, grows and continues to proliferate, pushes forward, mutates and transforms. In her paintings we are immersed in this eternal stream that offers no hold, no pause, that never stops. There is no now, but only the transition from the past into the future.

Jenny Day,

Born 1981 in the USA. Studied art at the universities of Fairbanks, Alaska and Tucson, Arizona. She also completed environmental studies in Santa Cruz, California. On the basis of intensive experiences of nature in her various places of residence and through perceptions in the border area between light and dark, she develops collage-like visions between appearance and reality. She shows apocalyptic-surreal worlds, in which the animals find their way through the transformation caused by humans and humans themselves are represented at most by their relics but otherwise play no role. Their view forward shows that the animals were on earth before us and probably after us. Her message is highly political, saying nothing more or less than that we, humans, as the only intelligent species, are not really needed by this planet.

Fleur Deakin,

Born in 1970 in the UK and studied Visual and Performing Arts there. Lives and works since about 3 years in Iserlohn. She makes an enormous effort in the selection and combination of different materials like hardly any other artist. What later appears to be a painting is actually a collection of elements with surface and haptic properties carefully selected by her. With unique procedures of collage and lacquer techniques developed by her, hyperbolic interpretations are created that contain floral appearing elements as a central element, looking like flower pictures, which in reality they are not. Her look ahead is the certainty that the way is the goal and that this way goes on and on, finding no end. She has found her very own and unique way and this uniqueness of her way is claim and legitimation to go on and on.

Florian Fausch,

Born in 1981 in Zurich, Switzerland. Studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Anzinger, whose master student he is. Lives and works in DüsseldorfHe himself says: “The visible, spaces. Structures, the urban, the digital, in short, everything that surrounds us in everyday life and accompanies us to depict in abstract painting. I put together new image motifs, split them apart into their individual parts and weave them together again. It is not a single impression that I have in mind, but rather a superimposition and fusion of different views of what sometimes seems incompatible into a new whole.” His colorful abstractions based on basic architectural elements seduce the viewer into a self-interpreting reconstruction that is hard to resist. His view shows us how individually and differently we enter into the interpretation of images, to what different results we come. It takes away the illusion that we are free in our thoughts and shows and rather how much we are arrested in our own history and project it into the future.

Stephan Geisler,

born in 1968, studied graphic design and illustration. He lives and works in Bochum and teaches art at various institutions in addition to his artistic work.His work is inseparable from him as a person and his fundamentally positive outlook on life. He knows how to create atmosphere with a few strokes, to bring out the character and essence of people, even animals as in his series with cows become highly independent beings. All this embodies pure joie de vivre and joie de vivre, colorful, loud, iconographic and sometimes bordering on pop art. His look forward is a thoroughly positive one. He shows us how positive, intense and exciting and emotional our lives can be if we approach issues with the right basic attitude.

Image: Clippings of all artists*.