Nandu Kriesche, born 1959 in Herzebrock (North Rhine-Westphalia), studied painting at the University of Applied Sciences Design in Bielefeld with Prof. Inge Höher. After a year of studying in Rome, she moved to Frankfurt in 1994-95. In 2004 she won the Offenbacher-Löwen-Kunstpreis, in 2017 the 2nd place at the Worpswede Art Prize and the Hessian Project Scholarship 2020. She has participated in various art fairs such as ART-Karlsruhe and Art Discovery Frankfurt and in public light art events such as the LUMINALE in Frankfurt. She has regular exhibitions in Germanyt and abroad. Her artistic activity focuses on working with transparent materials and their experimental combinations. Kriesche lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.

Nandu J. Kriesche about the new Serie InnerCircle:

This series is about the time in which nature apparently defends itself against a certain greed of humanity for infinity. The corona virus stops us and makes us think.

A certain distance around people – draws a circle.

After my light installation “every breath you take” at the beginning of 2020 I started again to paint pictures with oil on canvas. My previous curiosity to work with small glass spheres can also be found here, but the three-dimensional spheres have become circles. With the transparent painting style, they let the background shine through and therefore seem to exude a certain lightness in a floating state.

When I experienced the first effects of the lockdown in March 2020, I realized that this is also a historical moment that I would like to explore for myself in my art.

At the time I was presenting a light installation: “Every breath you take” at Luminale, which went on exactly one evening … It was a work that actually had our relationship with trees as its theme. The focus was on the structure and function of our lungs as a reminder of who we are and where we come from. Time to think about what is needed and what we will miss, an inner circle began to turn incessantly for many. Inner Circle I now called the series and more pictures followed.

INNER CIRCLE

Later, on a bike trip, I observed tree structures and in the tops of the trees I saw mistletoe hanging on their vital sap and sucking it in. So I decided to start a series of paintings that show this analogy. I took different photos of urban and natural situations and people who consciously go into nature but keep their distance, a completely new experience for all of us.

A lot of questions went through my head: What does it do to us? Is reflection a precaution of nature that we do not take it too far? Our belief in the controllability of technology is unsettling a small virus that does not make everyone extremely sick, but nonetheless, without noticing it, one becomes the spreading agent of this virus. Aircraft movements over the whole planet help enormously to spread, although freedom seemed limitless. Touching the other person is interpreted as an attack, we feel that requests to keep our distance are a duty, but it attacks our positive perception of being human. Suddenly I saw dead trees everywhere, which stood before me like memorials or mighty old trees that had been there for centuries … Was the old oak already there when the plague raged here?

Public cultural events offered me other motifs, people sat down in painted circles on the lawn. In between a juggler with two light balls … my painter’s heart was happy about so many motifs. Alone among people, to distance oneself, as a weapon against an almost invisible enemy, this now determines the series of pictures. I hope that my artistic contribution can bear witness to this difficult time.