True Colours – Farbe bekennen!

Claudia’s works are products of experimental development—they develop and change as each piece develops and changes. The creative process has a life of its own, and for Claudia, the artist’s job is to follow it and honour it. In recent years, Claudia has placed emphasis on woodcuts, using techniques that allow her to concentrate on background and foreground equally. Colour places an important role too, and one that demonstrates intention, layers, and depth.

These works are printed on atlas pages and note sheets from Richard Wagner’s Rheingold Opera, which she found in a box during a move in Cologne. Indeed, sometimes coincidence is a wonderful creative guide.

Graphic Designer Agnieszka is a master of all things digital media—her photo and video collages that emphasize themes of nature, humans and animals demonstrate a unique grasp of a computer software and digital art techniques. This, paired with her immense knowledge of photography, composition and technology come together to bring her works to life.

Born in Krakow, Poland, and now living in Germany, Agnieszka composes photo elements, videos, and 3D works using softwares like Photoshop and Blender to achieve a tranquility that reflects the juxtaposition of our ever-changing society and the elegance and habit of nature. With the rapid development of technology in this new artistic age, some find it hard to determine if Agnieszka’s works are photographs or drawings—an intriguing side effect that highlights just how technology and art can go hand in hand.

A trained fashion designer and milliner, Susanne prides herself in being a collector of moment. Every dot, every stitch, every thread is a moment that tells a story through colours, fragments, and experience, reflecting the vastness of Susanne’s imagination. These moments then find themselves populated on a canvas, or ordered into a monument by the artist, ready for others to examine.

For this reason, dots are a focus in Susanne’s work—each dot is a moment in time, a snapshot of imagination, a fragment of a story, or an emotion captured in the truth of colour. With each dot, each moment, the result is different. Sometimes, the process leads to works that reflect bliss and satisfaction. Other times, confusion and disappointment creep in. But either way, Susanne always pushes on, dot by dot, to eventually complete the picture of her true colours.

Singapore Native Dr. Irene S.M. Lee was trained by Chinese calligraphy masters at the Shanghai School Golden Stone Style in Singapore as well as by renowned calligraphers in Tokyo, Japan. In her works, she strives for creating a harmonious blend between the traditional and the contemporary, using her calligraphy training to communicate messages—both visual and emotional—in nuanced, unique ways. Through Chinese characters, Irene offers multiple interpretations of visual messages, which may be seem similar to its meaning, but are never identical.

Though the traditional often influences her works, Irene is not vessel through which the old merely lives on. Instead, she uses rice paper, Chinese brushstrokes, and traditional influence to bring the art form into a new era, one in which it is still powerful, bold, and mighty, but also flexible, refined, and fresh.

Lili is a multi-award winning multimedia artist based in Cologne. She experiments primarily with digital photo and video art, with which she creates interactive electronic installations, among others. Each work of hers has its own identity, its own character, its own feel, which she as the artist respects and nurtures. Her method gives the art immense freedom to develop itself, focusing on the joy in its own discontinuity, as well as how the artist and work become a measure of their unity and combined strength.

Experience and expertise allow Lili to choose the mediums that best communicate the message of her work, and each piece demonstrates another triumph of her artistic process. The work Female Tourist Demon, part of the True Colours exhibition, reflects this process in a provocative, humorous, and immodest way.

Since 1992, Marion has been working with tea leaves. She came across the medium by accident: after observing the remnants of her daily cups of tea drying in her atelier, Marion decided to give the leaves another life.

Tea leaves have a captivating structure—from afar they look soft and delicate, but they’re hard and scratchy to the touch. In this exhibition, Marion presents an installation of teacup objects, constructed from sketches and, of course, tea. These pieces highlight a recurring dialogue between East and West in Marion’s work, and how art is more than just a representation of culture: it is also a cultural asset.

Rajul’s works carry influence from her 20-year-long career in the pharmaceutical industry—elements of healing, hope and health are carried throughout. She wants to encourage a positive view of healing, one that parallels suffering with hope and meaning.

Be in through painting or photography, in colour or in black and white, literal or abstract, Rajul lets the idea guide the work. She defines herself as an artist that wants to visualize the healing process. The colours are all incredibly deliberate, and represent the Chakras—another primary influence and theme in Rajul’s pieces. They are reflective of the strong connection between the emotional and the physical, and these ideas mirror themselves not only in Rajul’s past, but through her art. Hope as a positive force that leads to physical and psychological healing is the guiding principle of her works.

Susana lives in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia and uses her environment as a source of constant inspiration and fascination. As an acclaimed artist, she focuses much of her work around masks—many of which have also been featured in performances that highlight the role rhythm and movement play in her work.

Susana’s five works in this exhibition are reflections of her belief that the soul speaks through pictures: these masks are reflections of her unconscious, of old myths and traditions, of what can be and could be. The masks are manifestations of her thoughts and feelings—they show inner conflict, nativity, the inner child, fear, hope, dreams.