is based on the idea of a colloquium. 4 painters and an art historian are invited to talk together about the subject of portraiture in painting.
With:
Felicity Brown (Norwich, UK)
Martin Holzschuh (Frankfurt/M, Germany)
Monika Romstein (Frankfurt/M)
Britta Kadolsky (Frankfurt/M)
Carolin Kropff (Frankfurt/M)
The different positions can be contemplated and discussed with us on Saturday, 30 October,
from 6 – 10 pm at STUDIOSPACE Lange Strasse 31 in Frankfurt/M.
About the artists:
Felicity Brown is a British artist and fashion designer. She studied art and textile printing at the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London.
Together with her brother Henry Brown she founded her own designer label and became part of NEWGEN, and this enabled her to show collections in London, Paris and New York. She has shown work at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the Handbag Museum in Seoul, and The Fashion Project at Bal Harbour Shops, Miami, alongside pieces by Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Léon Bakst and Hussein Chalaayan. She has been collaborating with Carolin Kropff since 2015.
Martin Holzschuh was a master student of Michael Krebber at the Städelschule. He writes:
I also drew, and not infrequently, a drawing was a trigger to paint a new image, transformed by the materiality of colour. Increasingly, my paintings darkened into dark, almost abstract surfaces. When this reached an endpoint, I began to approach a figurative position again through sketching. The painterly dialogue with Felicity, Monika and Carolin is a good occasion to continue these new approaches.
Monika Romstein (b. 1962, Saarlouis) lives and work in Frankfurt. Romstein is known for her work with watercolours, oilpaintings and installations, ranging from large scale to small format. Being highly motivated by a dark, haunting and fable-like range of references, her work includes imagery from domestic realities as well as landscape elements. Whether surreal or narrative, her intense and detailed paintings are often perceived as controversial.The figures and spaces in the intimate formats of the watercolors are about the refusal to accept the dictates of evidence that constitute our reality space. Thus, sceneries appear in the watercolors that at first seem strange and enraptured, yet continually refer to aspects of our present and past.
Britta Kadolsky is an art historian (MA) based in Frankfurt. She studied art history and art education at Goethe University in Frankfurt after working for a long time in a major bank. She also paints and draws herself and approaches art both theoretically and practically. During her studies, she discovered her love for writing about art and has been running her own art blog 'Was kann Kunst' since 2020. There she prefers to write about modern and contemporary art and posts articles regularly.
Carolin Kropff studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and Städelschule Frankfurt where she graduated. From 1989-1991 she worked as an assistant costume designer and men's tailor at the Theater Dortmund. From 1999 - 2002 she maintained studios in Madrid, Spain and 2006 - 2011 in Dubai, UAE. In 2020 she founded STUDIOSPACE Lange Strasse 31 in Frankfurt am Main. The project work is supported by the Kulturamt Frankfurt and the Fraureferat Frankfurt.
Her artistic work explores the relevance of cultural and communal inventions such as the archetype, myth, and traditional craft methods of making. Her interest lies in exploring the commonalities between image invention, creation and storytelling, and giving expression to their inherent possibility for communication, collaboration, and belonging to each other and to time. To this end, she increasingly makes use of folk art and participatory art forms.
Previous “pairs” were:
Jens Lehmann / Paul Zita. Text: Nicoletta Danila
Cristiana de Marchi / Susanne Schwieter. Text: Angelica Horn
Vroni Schwegler / Alex Katz. Text: Angelica Horn
Hannes Norberg / Peter Roehr. Text: Angelica Horn
Martin Holzschuh / Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim. Text: Cristiana de Marchi
Anja Conrad & Lucas Fastabend. Text Angelica Horn
Susan Donath & Vroni Schwegler. Text Dr. Sonja Müller
Michael Klipphahn & Anna Nero. Text Angelica Horn
Hassan Sharif & Carolin Kropff. Text Cristiana de Marchi, Angelica Horn
Coming next:
Cristiana de Marchi & Günter Zehetner