Franziska Holstein
08.09. – 03.11.2019

On the one hand, it is a truism that painters are concerned with painting. Franziska Holstein is not concerned with all the famous forms of their questioning, but rather with the richness of the possibilities of painting - to be hidden, rather underlying. Even in the early paintings that depict reality, this is the case: for like very few paintings, the works of the early 2000s convey atmosphere alongside reality: the world of smells and sensations that can be connected to the real world much more vividly than through its mere depiction. The various ways in which the whole could have been depicted appear again and again here - apparently not yet systematically - initially as a casual painterly exercise of what would also be possible picture by picture. Today this has come to the fore. The world of objects has long since been eliminated. Systematic questions are dealt with: those of sequencing, determining the number of attempts, and much more. The process used in the works shown here is as follows: layer after layer of acrylic paint is applied to the paper until the support is invisible. Hundreds of pictures are created, none of which we can see because they are painted over, because they were not the final picture for the moment. The well-known process of all-over includes the reverse side with equal weight: Franziska Holstein works on both sides with equal intensity. Then the decision is made - the work now already has a certain physical weight due to the sheer quantity of acrylic - that this is the one valid picture in the series, which the painter relates to all the other works. The aim is to create a sound, an atmosphere, a similarly differentiated image that can exist on its own and in the overall picture of the series. What do we see of this great concentrated pictorial effort? Because the acrylic is sealed. Unlike oil painting, the deeper layers do not show through. Instead, the acrylic covers up. Makes invisible. As a result, we see a multifaceted monochrome picture that bears traces of the fingers, traces of the painting medium and traces of the layers. The overpainted pictures bulge into what can now be seen, into the result. Like a quarry of our, if one wants to be pathetic, life, of our memory, they are only conscious and accessible to the painter, because only she has seen them, made them. But of course there is something that we also sense: history. Together, this is the “painted colored surface that was not there before.” (Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit on Bram van Velde)
(Klaus Gerrit Friese: History, painted)

In 2008, Franziska Holstein completed her master’s degree (graphics/painting) at the HGB Leipzig under Neo Rauch. The artist lives and works in Leipzig. As a participant in the exhibition project “Jetzt! Young Painting in Germany” by the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz - Museum Gunzenhauser and Deichtorhallen Hamburg (19.9.2019 - 19.1.2020), her work has been recognized this year as exemplary for the current movements of the medium of painting in Germany.
Franziska Holstein is showing new works at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven.

Curated by Thomas Trümper.