Galerie Martin Kudlek

Katrin Bremermann, who was born in Bremen in 1965, describes herself as a painter that works like a sculptor. A closer look at her “wax drawings” shows how accurate this statement is. These lacquer drawings on paper initially appear very graphic, clear and two-dimensional. Up close, however, you can see that the leaves are structured more like a relief. Black grids, hatching, lines or dots are usually applied to the paper first, followed by a layer of wax that makes the sheet partially transparent and only then is the strong lacquer color applied with the help of stencils. These works on waxed paper can only be fully grasped before the original. Because their slight depth effect and blurriness of the wax surface or the delicate lines in many leaves are completely lost in the photograph next to the dominant primary color.
Some of the colored areas are reminiscent of cutting patterns, architectural floor plans or strange characters. They are finely balanced and mutually relate to one another. The sheets live particularly through the play of positive and negative surfaces as well as between flatness and spatial depth. The color forms leave a lot of room for associations.

Franz Burkhardt often presents his drawing-installations in self-created architectural/sculptural surroundings, playing off and contextualizing both aspects of his work. The sculpture becomes a support for the drawings while the drawings question the genuinity and usability of the „non-ready mades“. The actual themes of the drawings evolve around day to day life and erotic subject matters, evoking nostalgic associations. His titles are often imbedded into the artworks in form of speech bubbles or quotes adding humorous and bemusing layers.

“Oskar Holweck is considered to be the pioneer of paper art in Europe.”
(Britta Kuth in the exhibition catalog “100 x Paper” at Villa Zanders).

Oskar Holweck is considered THE pioneer of paper art, ever since he started using industrial paper as his artistic material in 1956.

Born in St. Ingbert/Saar in 1924, Oskar Holweck studied in Saarbrücken and Paris. While his early ink and graphite works still used paper in the traditional sense as a support material, he created his first paper reliefs as early as 1958, which interpreted paper as a sculptural material in which phenomena of light, space and time were made manifest. Holweck had now found his subject and his material. The use of industrial paper and the consistent focus on the non-colour white became programatic for his work.

He described his working method vividly: “When working with paper, this means: Bending, creasing, crumpling, folding, pressing, squeezing, compressing, stretching, scoring, piercing, tearing, slitting, cutting, gluing, knocking, beating, drilling, sawing, etc. to singeing, heating, burning.”

Since 1958 he exhibited with the Zero group and since then took part in hundreds of important national and international exhibitions. His work is to be found in numerous international museums and private collections. Although he was invited to participate at Documenta in 1959 and 1972, he declined both times for personal reasons.

Oskar Holweck died in Sulzbach in 2007.

Helena Parada Kim was born in Cologne in 1982 to a Spanish father and a Korean mother.
A master student of Peter Doig, she has been exploring her multi-ethnic background in her figurative paintings since her studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The Korean traditional costume, the so-called Hanbok, plays a special role in her painting as a recurring, varied motif. Brought to Germany by Korean guest workers as an identity-forming piece of clothing, Parada Kim also questions her own cultural origins in the repeated depiction of this costume.

In her painting, Parada Kim entered into a dialogue with the European tradition of painting early on, both in the “classic” genres of still life, portraits and, in recent years, increasingly in large-format plant paintings. The fact that she also draws on East Asian pictorial traditions opens up multi-faceted narratives and new pictorial aesthetics, which the painter constantly explores anew.

Jonathan Callan (b. 1961, UK) studied at Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Fine Art. He was the Henry Moore Fellow in Sculpture, Winchester school of Art (1993) and won the Boise scholarship in 1992. 

Callan’s work ranges across a diverse set of mediums, methods and materials. It is linked by a preoccupation with the limitations of language. Callan often works with texts, books, maps, and photographs. Much of this information is sourced and filtered from secondhand books. He regards his own culture as one that is predominately literary and has had an almost lifelong concern in trying to reconcile his own deep interest in materiality with that pervasive literary history. The work can be both small and intimate and also expansive, sculptural installations that occupy whole spaces.

Simon Schubert was born in 1976 in Cologne, Germany.
The artist skilfully plays with style-defining features of architecture and spatial language, which he condenses into an artificial genre. Although Simon Schubert sometimes lines entire rooms with paper, in which sculptural, mysterious feather creatures indulge in supposedly cultic actions and faceless children lose themselves in enigmatic games, the parallel world, which in its surreality is reminiscent of cinematic scenes by David Lynch, remains only partially accessible. Spellbound, the visitor enters the fascinating architecture, which, however, always sets new barriers for him on the way inside, as with each additional viewing further paths open up visually, but remain physically closed. Bit by bit, the artist lures the recipient into a world that at a certain point begins to retreat from space into the surface, until the path can finally be completed as a mental act of individual imagination.