The metaphor is not entirely inappropriate. You enter the cool, shaded villas Studio space in the basement of the Opel, you feel almost like in a laboratory situation. “Laboratory” is the name of the Studio, in the selected art students to work for several months and are able to issue. Lena Grewenig does not use the simple and raw-looking space, however, as a sterile, strictly scientific experimental station. Rather, the open artistic, especially scenic Experiment with Material and color is in her heart.
The part not yet finished paintings of different sizes hanging conspicuously on a wall. Some small formats, however, are a bit shy and hiding in a corner. Here and there a canvas-objects hanging free in space. At the heart of Grewenigs Studio lab is a table, on which the artist boxes several betting and containers with stones and tool stored. The Rock, the visitor finds in the different States and stages, on piece, at other times crumbly or crushed into powder.
From the stones Grewenig manufactures Malpigmente. You use partially, particularly porous lava stones from the Sicilian volcano mount Etna, tells the 1988-born artist. Many stones have you collected in and around the village of Andratx, in Western Mallorca, she says. Last December, a Studio grant graduated from Grewenig there. Your concept was intended to explore the landscape and collect stones. “I wanted to use the pigments of nature for their own work,” says Grewenig. In Andratx, you created painted, among other things, on deformed pipes stretched cotton attached fabric pieces that let Mobile think. “With the painting space-consuming fiddling around”, so Grewenig describes her former Motivation.
patience is the images
in mid-March, when they moved into the Studio in the Opel villas, prepared them initially, especially pigments. view With the help of pictures began to Grewenig painting, the fragments of historic-genetic building in Rüsselsheim, Germany to take up. The concept rejected, but to provide a basis for exploring the own body as an object of artistic research. “It gets a little Performative,” explains Drawings of your modified approach. The new Oil in admixture of self-produced pigments-executed painting club show tents, and composed of constellations, sometimes alienated parts of the body. The patience, the Drawings of this exercise is to view the images. Here and there you will be amazed about gently protruding veins or precisely formulated parts of the skin.
“I wanted to paint a classic”, says the artist about her new series. “The Flesh has interested me,” she adds. Quite early it had been painted on them once figurative, remembers Grewenig. As she studied with Christa Closer to the Frankfurt städel school, whether you, however, from the objective to be moved away – “a new language in painting a try”. The more abstract, search functioning remained Grewenig, even after the completion of your degree in 2014 true. She now works closer and more focused, the artist’s training as a goldsmith, which she completed from 2016 to 2019 at the Hanau drawing Academy. At the städel school, it went mainly to the artist’s personality, says Grewenig, looking back. At that time, you have thought everything would have to come from the leisure. At the drawing Academy, you have learned, meanwhile, is something else: “You have to bring a lot of diligence.”
art and jewelry design, feels that Lena Grewenig as contrasting points: on the one Hand, the concrete, in everyday life, anchored in Design, on the other hand, the painting as something Floating, which takes place mainly in the head. With your training a family continued Grewenig tradition. Her Grand father was a goldsmith, her mother and other relatives would have learned the craft. Their artistic work to Grewenig run parallel to jewelry design. As an artist, it is preferably a continuous process: “There must accompany you always.” You should not force yourself to make art, but also the potential work crises happen.
