Galerie Filser & Gräf

“My artistic work reflects my search for sound, complexity, differentiation, and challenge. Epistemology, experience, intuition, and creativity in a constantly ongoing and changing process find their way into the design and expression of my art.”
Christa Filser

Landscapes by Christa Filser
Christa Filser's composition of the pictorial space is based on the design of different elements made of colored and natural paper layers. It can be understood as a consistent further development of the arrangement of vertical, representational image content towards abstraction, which derives its narrative power from the horizontal order of cognitive perception and classification. Christa Filser demonstrates how deconstruction suddenly develops creative potential and how chaos unexpectedly gives rise to a provisional order, a balance from which new worlds, horizons, and realities are born.

Collages and drawings by Christa Filser
When examining the artist's works in detail, it becomes apparent that there is a clear difference between what can be seen superficially and materially and what lies beneath.
Christa Filser not only stages, but also vehemently observes and comments on human life and behavior patterns through her characters. The path to the goal leads through the role-playing of her protagonists.

The imagery of Christa Filser's artistic works is populated by fantastical creatures, comic book characters, and fairy tale figures who reenact the scenes of the day through their role-playing.
The artist's approach to highlighting the bizarre nature of everyday life is so subtle that one only notices the absurd humor once one has already accepted the fictionality of the representation as reality. The intensity and presence of an intermediate space, an in-between that extends between the tension of allusion to reality and fictional being, comes to life in the artist's collages and drawings.
Stefan-Maria Mittendorf M.A. – Art historian and curator

The artist Mads Rafte Hein (born 1977) lives and works in Roskilde, Denmark.
He graduated as a graphic designer from the Technical University of Copenhagen in the field of graphic design. He was also taught by renowned artists such as Grethe Bagge, Bjørn Poulsen, Peter Carlsen, and Peter Nansen Scherfig. He has exhibited in Germany, Taiwan, Austria, and Sweden and has participated in numerous exhibitions in Denmark, including three times at the spring exhibition in Charlottenborg and at the autumn exhibition of artists at Den Frie in Copenhagen. His works can be found in numerous private collections and art associations.

Sebastian Herzau is always on the lookout for new challenges in classical painting techniques. He mainly focuses on the traditional genres of portraiture and still life, which he translates into his own artistic style. He creates illusions in the spirit of trompe-l'œil painting and ambiguous imagery that reveal his experimental curiosity. He often adds a special touch of “Herzau humor” that makes the viewer smile.

In addition, the artist has been working on his series “tgb. the great below” for years. It is important to him to stimulate the process of perception and, if possible, to explore or create a voyeuristic, mysterious feeling. What is hidden behind it? What is real and what is illusion?

The fluorescent paint not only serves as an eye-catching signal color, but the viewer is even encouraged to interact with the portrait using a small black light flashlight and make the paint glow in the dark, creating another level of perception.

In his new still lifes, Sebastian Herzau also uses painted adhesive tape to humorously stage everyday objects and small observations—sometimes representational, sometimes abstract.
“I don't think I ever really take a break in everyday life—my eyes and ears are constantly open,” says Herzau about his creative process.

Jessi Strixner's works are characterized by precise craftsmanship and powerful imagery. With a keen sense of materiality and form, she develops figurative works that oscillate between realism and surreal exaggeration. Her artistic practice reflects social issues and personal narratives—often with a subtle, subversive humor and an aesthetic clarity that immediately touches the viewer.

Tobias Stutz's pictorial concepts thrive on the quiet tension between order and omission. Although he is influenced by clear, geometric structures—inspired by modernist architecture and Bauhaus aesthetics—he often avoids explicit symmetry. Excerpts are chosen in such a way that the viewer's gaze is directed not to the center but to the side; light sources accentuate surfaces unevenly; frames and image formats are deliberately modulated in some works (e.g., shaped canvas) to disrupt expectations of symmetrical balance. Through these means, his works create a sense of deeper spatiality and immersion, as if we were not standing in front of a painting, but in a real space that is at once open, incomplete, and poetic.

Maria Wallenstål-Schoenberg's paintings create color harmonies that interact rhythmically, as in a piece of music. Lower layers of color vibrate forward, then disappear, only to reappear elsewhere in a new form. Color fields relate to one another, shapes come into contact at their edges, and the edges of the picture tell their own stories. The color value is formally constituted in its own vital liveliness, resulting from enhancing, invigorating undertones. The process of bringing out a color value through modulating layering as a painting process gives color an active role. It literally grows out of itself, actively shaping itself in its color power. Similar to the medieval changeant or the three-stage color modulation—according to light, medium, and shadow values—the enhanced beauty value of a color tone arises from temperature- and brightness-related or neighboring color tone variations, which are layered on top of each other like glazes.
Inspired by artists such as Johannes Itten, Barnett Newman, and Joan Mitchell, among others, the artist has created a body of work in recent years that is of international significance.