Ankalina Dahlem

ARTIST

Ankalina Dahlem

The octopus is a special animal, famous for its intelligence and ability to learn. Three hearts beat in its body, and its blood is blue. It has nine brains, one central and another in each of its eight arms. Its body parts can grow back. The octopus is an “old friend,” as Ankalina Dahlem affectionately calls him, who appears as a friendly guardian and helpful creature in her surreal pictorial worlds. His abilities make him an equal partner of the human female pictorial figures. Thus, the artist focuses on a positive image of the animal, not like Jules Verne and others who depicted it as a sea monster.

Birds, octopuses, fish, dogs, snakes, owls, monkeys, energizing spirits, and skeletons appear in Dahlem’s painting, which features a fresh new color scheme on larger formats. If one knows her earlier reduced works of restrained coloration to a mild black and white, now the green-blue intensity surprises in its impression of water worlds, to which the painter as an enthusiastic swimmer and diver has a special relationship. Glazed layers of paint convey a sense of floating and flying that Dahlem wants to be understood as a world of dreams. The transparent application of paint appears as if painted with water; it raises to the fluidity of the element. Lighter color lies over darker like a veil through which one must first see. This enhances the atmospheric lightness. Trained at the Pasadena Art Center, the Städelschule and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, she loves the intertropical convergence zone with its hazy humidity.

In fact, this moisture is conveyed in her paintings. Drops of paint have run across the picture surface, leaving traces like the tears of a watery liquid. With this technical means, the traditional holding of a pictorial object seems to dissolve and become a narrative that oscillates indecisively between a coming and a passing. Sometimes the paint is applied in a translucent surface, sometimes it is applied in rapid, radical strokes and is reminiscent of climbing plants. The painterly gesture slides over into abstraction, while the draftsmanship – the artist describes herself as coming from drawing – remains present throughout, which is especially evident in the cloud depictions. It gives the impression that she does not want to decide whether she wants to present clouds as atmospheric-diffuse cotton wool-like elements or, with a few contour lines, as drawings reminiscent of mouths.

In an orangutan, the artist has found another powerful guardian. Sitting sadly, he fills the canvas. A comparison with the monkey portraits of Rosemarie Trockel suggests itself, who wants to treat the disturbed relationship to the animal world by representing the individuality of the animal. In Dahlem’s work, the orangutan becomes an equal counterpart with whom she sympathizes, with whom she identifies. Here one might think of the idea of “Making Kin”, the American feminist science theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway.