Mal. Klasse
JENNY FORSTER, NICOLA HANKE, ANNA KLÜSSENDORF, ANNA KRAMMIG, FELIX REHFELD, MARTIN SPENGLER
29.09. – 17.11.2013

At the end of September, the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven promises us a reminiscence: six of Karin Kneffel’s master students will be showing their works in the exhibition mal. klasse.

Karin Kneffel taught from 2000 to 2008 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bremen, where students Nicola Hanke, Anna Krammig, Felix Rehfeld and Martin Spengler had already begun their painting studies. In 2008, she was called to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and together with the professor, the four moved to the south of the country. There, Jenny Forster, who had previously been a student of Ralph Flecks, and Anna Klüssendorf, who had previously studied with Nikolaus Lang, joined the new class. This year, the six are making the opposite journey and after five years there will be a kind of reunion in the north.

The way the six work is very different. Jenny Forster explores the question of how people have formed an image of the world over the course of cultural history and how they do so today. Nature serves as her working material to translate her questions about development, change and the creation of the world into visual forms, both formally and in terms of content. In a long process, she develops spaces for thought through multiple reworkings of the surface, which invite the viewer to position themselves in these spaces again and again.

In her paintings, Nicola Hanke declares everyday objects to be worthy of being depicted. Like a zoom, she focuses on objects that normally receive little or no attention, or at most only casual attention: carelessly thrown towels, rumpled bed linen, a curtain in a window, fabrics and patterns that happen to be on top of each other. Just as it is about surfaces, it is also about the superficiality of our perception.

Anna Klüssendorf draws the source of her work from the usual media, but then transforms this flood of images into her very own cosmos. She manifests this in large-format oil paintings as well as in small-format watercolors. The result is a highly idiosyncratic spectacle of figures and landscapes.

In her artistic work, Anna Krammig focuses on the casual and everyday things in life that are of interest to her. She tries to gain an overview and intensify the precision of perception by looking closely and by painting in great detail.

Felix Rehfeld paints pictures about painting. Small, self-contained areas of color are painted in large format, and thus become pictures that themselves tell of painting. Whether flowing gold or a monochrome area of ​​color - each picture becomes its own thing-like structure, an autonomous form.

Martin Spengler’s works are based in the traditional picture format and at the same time are expanded by an aspect through the elaboration into a relief. Spengler reduces familiar objects to an essential moment that can be experienced through the contrast between shadow and light. Through this reduction, everyday phenomena are transformed into a different form of existence.

Curated by Thomas Trümper.