Gisela Engeln-Müllges

The results speak for themselves: the new forms of columns, walls, skylines and even globe shapes are evidence that much can still be achieved using Werth’s casting process even after his career unfortunately has ended. Engeln-Müllges has succeeded in creating highly complex sculptures. We find various discs, from wafer-thin to thick, used to create her columns. Thanks to a highly diverse range of incisions, these forms vary constantly depending on the viewer’s angle. Now, Engeln-Müllges has fused sculpture and base together by directly including the bottom of a sculpture in the casting process. 

Moreover, Engeln-Müllges’s skylines further develop the theme of walls. In these pieces she creates large-scale works characterized by the tremendous complexity of their shapes. What from a distance resembles a succession of building parts of varying heights arranged in a row, proves on closer inspection to be a highly-complex spatial creation, which boasts an ever-changing array of new shapes, perspectives and in particular a dramatic depth of field, depending on the vantage point of the viewer. No part of the sculpture is the same. The surfaces and structures are in a continual state of change. Interruptions and slight changes of angle give the sculptures added life and even a semblance of playful lightness. 

Anke Blaue

Dans l'atelier en temps de pandémie.

Je vis et travaille dans le nord de l'Allemagne, dans une maison isolée à la campagne près de la frontière avec le Danemark. Même comme ça, pendant la pandémie, l'isolement social dans cette partie de l'Europe a également été très élevé. Très rigoureux. Presque tous les contacts personnels ont cessé. Dans cette situation, dans mon cas, et étant donné que j'ai l'atelier dans ma maison, je me suis concentré sur mon travail.

La peinture, l'exigence que cela implique, m'a permis d'être au présent  tous les jours.

J'ai poursuivi mon travail, mais en même temps je commence une autre nouvelle variante. J'avais déjà commencé avec de légères asymétries, mais maintenant j'étudie plus intensément cette nouvelle variante dans ma peinture. En ce moment, il semble que la pandémie commence à se calmer, mais mon rythme de travail est le même et l'abstraction asymétrique continuera avec moi.

Zeina Nader

I am a child of the war. I am a Lebanese painter and my art has always been my escape from the difficult situation in my country, since my childhood.

Few months before the Coronavirus has invaded the world, Lebanon was already going through very painful times. The country was facing a revolution. And so, the lockdown provoked by the spreading of the virus, was added to the complexity of our internal matters. It’s a global situation. It’s a world economical crisis, but for Lebanon it is indeed a desperate cause. I see around me people suffering from hunger because of the rapid and catastrophic devaluation of our monetary system. The fear of being contaminated by the Covid-19 was added to the disaster of our financial and economical breakdown. 

I, as an artist, have suddenly seen all my doors closed. I already missed 3 international exhibitions and the confinement has given me more reasons to be anxious and worried. One of my sons is still blocked alone in London and the daily amount of bad news, coming from everywhere, have been good reasons of despair. However, I never let myself down. I never stopped painting. I was very productive during these last months. My brushes and my tubes have been my best friends and my colors have turned the grayish days into bright ones. My art is my personal therapy and that is why I can’t live without painting.

I did big and small scales of canvases. I used different medias and I could let my imagination travel in so many beautiful places. I created my own new world, filled with peace, love, health and sunshine, through my abstract brushstrokes. My paintings are all joyful and happy. They are the hidden spaces of my mind. They are ecstatic rays of light and I want them to bring hope and peace to anyone who would admire or acquire them.

Therefore I always repeat: “Art will save the world.”

Beatriz Minguez de Molina

Super surface

The Horizon of time, or a fertile tranquility of eternally recurring time.

Super surface is a project about essentially about time and nature through the endless combination of water, light and movement in the surface of the sea.

When Nietzsche identified time as “the source of nihilism”, he was talking about modern, linear time that moves ineluctably forward,erasing and eradicating past events one by one.Nietzsche deconstructed modern ideas of time to devise the idea of the “eternal return”, a concept of time that reaffirmed life and the world. He turned the focal point of our existence away from the phase of linear time, where new things irreversibly become old, pivoting it to the phase of the “eternal”, where every dimension of time – past, present, and future – is layered and recurs, enabling the experience of what we will call the “con-temporarity”. In contrast to the contemporarity that the twentieth-century art so hungered for meaning “new” and “newest” in the sense of linear time erasing the past as it moves forward, we can define another contemporarity where every dimension exists in the fertile eternity.

In every work of this series we focus on a single instant with a sort of magnifying glass, looking for the emtotions of the smallest instants and details of this recurring time. We study the infinite variations of the light reflections and movement of the surface of the sea. And by depicting this instant we try connect with the eternal, the unconscious and look to move the viewer by the feeling of vastness of the sea bathed on the calming light of the sunset.

Rebeca Martinez

This quarantine period of time has helped me to reflect on how important it is to return to our bases, to our family, to value many things, such as being able to hug those you love the most. Not to fill ourselves with things that do not give us peace and to rediscover the things that we had forgotten.

It makes me realize how fragile we are as a human being and how in one day life can change and you have no control of it, but you will always have control of your happiness.

`Shijo´ Alan Burner

Though recent events have been unnerving, to say the least, I have the sense that earth will be healing itself to a new and exciting future. Certainly, we are very sensitive about this confinement and the effects of it, yet for me, it has brought about feelings that there will be a new and exciting time birthed at the end of it. Just as the violin played a major role when Baroque music entered the world with its dynamic emotion, it feels as though there is a certain excitement ahead for our world.

The global issues we have on our good planet we face together, the harmony and peace we express are hopeful,  as we have turned this crisis into a time to further create an oneness.

We must have the anticipation for the soon coming future when we all understand how much we need to appreciate what we do have. The artwork that I have created is with that understanding, with some degree of peace and joy knit through the work itself. Please enjoy the anticipated liberation and emotion woven into my new work. It was created with a need to express my emotions as an artist, first with a certain fear, but then soon after followed by a thankful heart, and peace of mind knowing that we will all have a new and exciting world soon.

Fernanda Rodrigo

As an artist, I resist into art, in the silence of my workshop. With the strangeness of a time that hurts and burns us.

What is different now is not so much the process as what goes through me, permanently. There are more questions than answers. And this gives us the possibility to rethink ourselves.

To change confinement for seclusion to go deeper. To know the folds of the soul. To listen, to be alert. To write of all that grew two remained.

The autumn wind erased the intentions and the foolishness but it brought the river smell and some of the childhood, maybe we put our feet and hands to soak, we softened the knees and the elbows bled hitting one wall of the room and the other

The dogs knew and howled some woke up. Branch buds pierced my insides letting light pass. You became skin and bone and flesh water and sun.

Anastasios Paraskevopulos

I miss the little things, going out for coffee with friends or business prospects, seeing the hustle and bustle of everyday life in my little town, or just being able to recognize people’s faces on the street, something I’m having a hard time doing now, with identities partly erased by a face covering. The current COVID-19 pandemic is making me see the value of those thousands of little everyday things under a new light.

I value more the freedom to go visit family and friends whenever the whim had nudged me, or going to the store without having to wait in line for the privilege of going in safely, or seeing people’s mouths move as they talk – it’s a weird thing to hear people talk without the mouth connected with the sound of their words coming behind a face covering.

In the words of an army captain being chided by a superior for not charging up a disputed mountain for which they had been ready and rocking to do just a moment prior: the situation has changed.

COVID-19 has changed the situation for the world, for bad and for worse, but also for possibilities. Now, I’m learning to do ZOOM meetings, Facebook Live get-togethers; I’m sharpening online skills to create new business opportunities; I’m adapting to the need of the moment. That’s what humans do. That’s what they’ve done throughout history. That’s what we’re doing now – changing our way of life, adapting, re-routing, proving, and finding what works and what doesn’t – changing to meet the changing situation.

I feel we’re entering a new normal; a new way of doing things. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I’ve just heard that now seniors can have video doctor appointments in the comfort of their homes; I’m seeing people being more conscious of keeping their hands and bodies clean and the benefits of social distancing; people are finding out that there’s a lot of work that can be done online from home. Work is being redefined. The possibilities increase every day. And maybe that’s a good thing. We’ll make it a good thing. We have to because…the situation has changed.

Léa Dolinsky

Life, human beings and the relationship between them, always inspired me. People live in groups as a social community, they are close, they can touch and embrace each other. World pandemic Covid 19, changed the parameters that regulate our life.

The social and cultural isolation, the loneliness and the prolonged staying inside home shake up the foundations of our existence and start giving alarming signals. Those signals, widely expressed in my Covid 19 paintings.

The freedom to create provided an unexpected source of tiny optimism, and was able to fill up our inner space for a while.
Coming out of the current crisis is meeting a concerned and reluctant community, with economic and other hardships.

We are looking forward to better times and freedom in all aspects of our life. 

Julieta Valdéz Rementería

ll my feelings are together showing the great power of color and vibrations, with joy and fear, during the cuarentena and changes hard to believe like a dream!

My Work is done in an envoirment full of peace and beauty, sorrounded by the countryside.

Isabel Robles

Work inspired by the flamenco Duende (Granada).

I think this call is very positive. Art is freedom and right now it is what we need the most. With this confinement, being able to feel free to express our thoughts in a work is something wonderful for the artist and for the viewer.

I, personally, have been through various states of mind, from fear to tranquillity. The negative of this quarantine I think is the unwanted loneliness and lack of freedom. The positive thing is to see the strength and capacity that humans have to adapt to everything.

I hope that something good will come out of all the bad we are experiencing, that we realize what we are and have, that we put aside vanity, selfishness and ambition. My wish is that we stop killing, criticizing and insulting each other. Also, we realize once and for all that we are all equal, that we have to take care of each other and help each other. Do not forget about the planet that we are destroying, that would be my wish after this disaster.