With Insomnia, the painter Miriam Vlaming is presenting her first institutional solo exhibition in Potsdam. On display are works, some of them large-format, that exemplify her current artistic exploration of the relationship between man and nature. The exhibition draws attention to the fragility of this relationship, to processes of change and to the spiritual dimension that can lie in the connection with the natural world.
The Challenge revisits the motif of the sun, which, as in Insomnia, plays a central role in the pictorial space. Two girls are at the center of the composition, flanked by two larger-than-life cats. They appear both as protectors and as symbolic guardians of the transition between childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The Challenge shows the feeling of threshold time and transformation, the
visual world full of comic-like, almost sweetly playful elements reinforces the ambivalence of departure, between idyll and challenge.
In Karussell, the relationship between humans and animals takes center stage. A trainer makes horses lie down, a gesture of submission that simultaneously raises questions about domestication, power and the loss of originality. Here, too, the complexity of Vlaming’s visual worlds is evident, combining the real with the imaginary.
Insomnia presents an artist whose painting is not only complex in terms of content, but is also characterized by her technical precision and atmospheric depth.
Miriam Vlaming, born in Hilden in 1971, studied painting at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig under Arno Rink and Neo Rauch, where she graduated as a master student in 2001. Her works have been shown in numerous national and international exhibitions and are represented in private and public collections.
The eponymous work Insomnia forms the starting point. Three female figures sit in the water in front of a colorful, pulsating landscape, their gaze fixed on an abstracted sun. The pictorial space oscillates between dream and reality, waking and sleeping. An intermediate area is created in which the perspective is directed towards the experience of nature, inwardness and collective memory.
All the works in the exhibition are executed in egg tempera on canvas, a technique in which the artist mixes her colors by hand from pure pigments. The intensive creation process is an expression of her interest in materiality, transformation and the energy of color. The paintings develop their own powerful physicality as a result.
The content of her work revolves around archetypal themes: Echo combines painting with graphic text elements and reflects on the traces of human existence, both individually and collectively. The inserted fragments, often comic elements, open up an additional, linguistic level of meaning in which memory, the leaving of traces across generations and the awareness of how we deal with our world merge with one another.
Kunstverein KunstHaus Potsdam e.V.
Ulanenweg 9
14469 Potsdam