From July 4 to August 24, 2024, Galerie Barbara von Stechow presents the group exhibition “Summertime” and welcomes summer to the gallery space with flowery and stage-like staged still lifes, multi-faceted portraits and scenes of everyday life, as well as lively sculptures.
The artist Cveta Markova impresses with her precise powers of observation and her pronounced sense of color: the former Städel student deals intensively with the depiction of people on both a figurative and abstract level. Her works are created in several glazed layers. She depicts what we usually perceive, at best out of the corner of our eye, and quickly forget – a snapshot.
Angel Peychinov devotes herself to portraits of women in all their facets. Sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, painted or drawn – Angel Peychinov’s art consists of recognizing the right moment, the moment worthy of a picture, from a wealth of impressions and then giving it a form in his paintings that goes beyond this moment. In 2007, he completed his studies as a master student at the Städelschule under Prof. Näher.
Jochen Pankrath‘s painting is direct and immediate. When looking at them, you can sense that the artist seeks to translate what he has seen directly into painting. The focus of his painting is color and the subject of the “picture” itself. Pankrath makes use of traditional themes from art history such as the figure, landscape and still life. He takes palettes and random color arrangements and composes them into a picture by adding figurative painting. Pankrath studied at the Nuremberg Academy and was a master student of Ralph Fleck.
Through the stage-like staging, the painter Paul Mathey succeeds in placing everyday objects in the focus of the viewer. These objects are mostly trivialities such as a vase, a piece of fruit or a glass. Taken out of their conventional context, they form the central focus of Paul’s works. Paul Mathey was also a master student at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.
The sculptor Christof Paul often draws on prominent role models for his designs. The astronaut is a recurring element in Paul’s work. As a passionate nature photographer and animal lover, Paul’s figures often have a small, four-legged companion. The surfaces of the figures with their traces of processing always refer to their creation. A deliberately rough treatment, for example, distinguishes the clothing from the finely worked body parts and faces.
Carmen Belean‘s series of landscape paintings transform pool views and their gardens into refuges of female identity and self-determination. Belean’s characteristic use of color underscores the mysterious and ambivalent interplay of distance and proximity, as all views share a pause in timelessness. This reinforces the secluded stillness as a spatial distance to all outsiders. Belean translates the pool with its surrounding garden or the natural spaces she depicts into solitude, in which she is able to find and preserve a new femininity in order to reinvent the garden as a closed place of longing.
