About Renaissance 8

In the silence of her studio, similar perhaps to the silence that might have prevailed in the workshops of the Old Masters, Anna Lena Straube worked for months on a new series of large-format paintings. The title: Renaissance 8.
Renaissance: this word immediately brings to mind that legendary epoch in Europe in which the image of man, art and indeed the whole view of the world changed fundamentally. An era of the senses and discoveries. Of euphoria. Of rebirth: the art of antiquity and the beauty of the human body were rediscovered and praised as if they had just been born in all their glory. Or as the cultural historian Johan Huizinga put it: “The Renaissance is the emergence of individualism, the awakening of the desire for beauty, the triumphal procession of worldly lust and happiness, the conquest of earthly reality by the spirit, the renewal of pagan joie de vivre, the awareness of the personality in its natural relationship to the world”.

A thirst for beauty, individualism, a love of the world: all this can be found in the paintings of Anna Lena Straube. Her Renaissance 8 is inspired by the paintings of Botticelli, Michelangelo and Titian.
In the Christian numerical symbolism of the Middle Ages, eight is a sign of new beginnings, spiritual rebirth and a symbol of happiness. A constant cycle of becoming and passing away.

The large-format paintings are based on photographs that the artist took in the late summer of 2020. Anna Lena Straube met up with artist friends, dancers and performance artists in the Bürgerpark in Berlin Pankow for this purpose. Eight people, women and men, who moved freely at their own pace in the setting of the park. They interacted wordlessly with each other. A slowly transforming group of individuals making their way through the park. Like a living sculpture, painting in motion. Place and time, inside and outside do not represent boundaries in the pictures, rather everything flows into one another. Fascinated by her movements, the artist briefly joined the group.
Unlike in Renaissance paintings, in which each figure is assigned a special role, a specific place in the hierarchy, the protagonists themselves decide which place they occupy during the performance.

While the laws of our “real” world are suspended, as in a dream or in the unconscious, the work of art is condensed and intensified within the working process: the performances of contemporary artists are captured in photographs, the photographic motifs are then transferred to the canvas and combined with ornaments and baroque-like structures. Above all, the painter celebrates the beauty of the human body.
A mixture of Baroque and Woodstock. But the word “fantastic” does not fit this series.
This is not about fantasy.
If we look into our material world, we see how everything is in a state of upheaval. Supposedly unshakeable certainties are disappearing faster than we would like. Similar to the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times, our view of the world is also changing.
Instead of euphoria, we are looking into a deep abyss full of uncertainties. Perhaps this is precisely why Anna Lena Straube’s series is entitled Renaissance 8. The essence of the rebirth that we see in her pictures is considerably older than the Baroque and Renaissance periods. It reaches far back into a past without hierarchical systems of order, without the man-made separation of nature and culture.

Anna Lena Straube’s pictures are rather to be understood as a kind of dream. A vision of a world as it could be. Was it not also in the silence of the scriptoria and workshops where the idea and form of the Renaissance began, long before it came into the public eye? Before the spirit of the age had taken hold of an entire society?
There is a shudder in every beginning, but also a magic. Let the universe of the Renaissance 8 inspire us and kindle in us a new lust for life. The world is on the move. Do you notice that too?

Berlin, Dorothée Zombronner, cultural scientist Source:
Huizinga, Johan. The problem of the Renaissance. Renaissance and Realism. Scientific
Book Society, Darmstadt, 1952.