Galerie Sturm is pleased to announce the opening of our new location at Galgenhofstraße 33, 90459 Nuremberg, with the solo exhibition “Tandaradei” by Christiane Bergelt.

In her fifth solo show at Galerie Sturm, the artist Christiane Bergelt approaches the dialectical connection of alienation and intimacy with a series of paintings on paper. This contradictory relation already appears in exhibition’s title “Tandaradei” – a lyrical and uncommon neologism, invented by the German medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide. He created the term for his song “Under den Linden”, so as to allegorically describe the sound of nightingales. As the heading for Bergelt’s new works, the title’s unfamiliar tone subliminally accompanies the painting’s compositions and surrounds them with a feeling of indefiniteness.

Figurative shapes amount to a significant part of her paintings, even though Bergelt  completely avoids a narrative depiction. She is interested in a disembodied, apparitional depth, which grows behind the familiar representational forms. Excluding realistic details, the artist effortlessly challenges and plays with the borders of figuration. Motifs, as for example a stump, a portrait or a pair of tighs, are subjected to transformation: With thick brushstrokes, Bergelt overpaints, carves or smudges the shapes, so that the selected materials – the colour’s consistency, the paper, the canvas – develop their own physicality.

For the artist, the materials’ behaviour with and against each other, creates an essential tension, in which she traces the balance between melancholic and cheerful outcomes: While her large works stand out due to their forcefulness and their cool colour tones, the smaller portrait formats evoke intimacy and empathy. Bergelt, however, does not follow  calculated effects, but her artistic practice is rather geared to the painterly coincidence – a strategy of surprise, which she provokes via experiments with the material and the compositions. Also the choice of colours is based on an intuitive process, which Christiane Bergelt eventually trusts to determine the effect of her paintings.

Christiane Bergelt, born 1982 in Marienberg, studied at Chelsea College of Art an Design London and under Prof. Thomas Hartmann and Prof. Christine Colditz at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Nürnberg. At this year’s  SCOPE Basel (10th – 16th June), Galerie Sturm will present works by Christiane Bergelt and Tobias Buckel.
The artist lives and works in Berlin.