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until 10.01. | #2628ARTatBerlin | Köppe Contemporary shows from 29th November 2019 the exhibition Beyond Now with artworks by the artist Romy Campe.
Man plays the central role in Romy Campe’s work. The artist’s portraits reflect human characteristics – inner states, sensitivities and moods. Although the motifs also show characteristics of the fantastic and surreal, all this refers to the early modern tradition of the psychological image of man. Thus, some motifs evoke associations with painting traditions (Caravaggio, Franz Hals, Rembrandt).
Scheuklappen | 130 x 100 cm, Pigment HD Print auf Aluminium, 2018 | Auflage: 10 + 1 AP
The artist’s painting technique is also related to the procedures of the Old Masters. She superimposes up to forty layers of glaze in the painting process. The fact that Romy Campe mixes surreal and fantastic dimensions into the Old Master’s form of expression lends her compositions a particularly idiosyncratic and individual touch. What she paints are imaginary worlds in the border area between reality and dream, true image and bizarre creation. A specific expression of the eyes, as well as the gestures and gestures of the people she depicts, point to inner constitutions. Such motives reflect feelings of life and feelings – longings, expectations, hopes or confidence, but also fear, anger or despair.
O.T. | 40 x 30 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, 2018
Often starting from her own self-image, the artist plays through her motifs. In addition to depicting modern, mostly young women from everyday life, fantastic figures, mixed or mythical creatures or mythological creatures populate her oeuvre. Symbioses and transformations are omnipresent.
Indian (Serie Morphing) | Pigment HD Print auf Aluminium | Auflage: 10 + 1 AP
A dominant aspect of many of Romy Campe’s works is the deep dark background, often in subdued colours, against which her figurations act. It is associated with the effect of ‘sfumato’ (the blurred or indefinite). This stylization or fading out of a concretely tangible space underlines the impression of an imagination or a fantastic intermediate zone in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and dream or between today, yesterday or tomorrow.
Have A Look | 80 x 60 cm, Tusche und Collage auf Leinwand, 2018
“My pictures show visions of human existence and encompass areas of imagination, desire, dreaming and escaping from the present,” Romy Campe once explained her works in an interview. In spite of the dreamlike ambiguity in which the artist “embeds” many of her motifs, her pictures also evoke associations with our modern present and the unsettling experiences associated with it.
Behütet | 130 x 100 cm, Öl und Acryl auf Leinwand, 2019
Thus themes such as melancholy or the search for one’s own identity are just as present in the artist’s motifs as the resistance. In Romy Campe’s pictures, the ram becomes a mythical symbolic figure. With his curved horns, his strength and his courage, he stands for assertiveness and resistance against everything that oppresses him.
Mondsucht | 130 x 100 cm, Mischtechnik auf Leinwand, 2018
Collages play a special role in the artist’s oeuvre. On the one hand, there are works in which Romy Campe combines painting with photography. On the other hand, they are motifs that emerge from the symbiosis of painting and photography as well as from an experimental working process on the computer (for example on the basis of the artist’s photographic self-portraits). Romy Campe describes the results of such a working process as “morphings”. In these morphings there is not only a lot of room for chance, but here the artist – for example with the “destruction” of her own (photographic) self-portrait – also takes a step beyond herself. In their hybridity, these images appear mysterious or disturbing on the one hand, but on the other hand they also irritate the motifs of beautiful poses that constantly surround us in advertising or the mass media, exposing them as manipulation and deception.
Statement (Serie Creative Pastime) | 20 x 15 x 12 cm, Materialcollage, 2015
More than ever, the image of man has become questionable and unpredictable. This motif is a red thread that runs through the work of the artist Romy Campe. The fairytale-like, imaginative, grotesque and bizarre contrasts in a subtle way with the shady, unfathomable and uncanny.
André Lindhorst
Vernissage: Thursday, 28 November 2019, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Ausstellungsdaten: Friday, 29 November – Friday, 10 January 2020
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Exhibition Romy Campe – Köppe Contemporary | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
