Helene Appel (*1976, Karlsruhe) studied painting at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and the Royal College of Art in London. She detaches familiar things from their domestic surroundings and places natural phenomena at the center of her paintings. In a variety of formats, from small to large, the works seem so tangible and real that it seems almost impossible to escape their presence. This is precisely what determines Helene Appel’s illusionistic paintings on raw,untreated linen: they transport the viewer into familiar, everyday and often accidental situations involving touch, smell or taste, thus evoking immediate associations with the object. The tactile quality of the works even tempts the viewer to touch them, so unlikely is it that what they are looking at is actually painting on canvas. Each object is presented at the same time out of ordinary constellation, which in turn draws all the attention to the details.

Slawomir Elsner (*1976 in Poland) lives and works in Berlin. He has gained international recognition for his meticulous colored pencil drawings and extensive watercolor works. In his series “Imaginäre Erinnerung (Imaginary Memory)”, which so far comprises about 150 works and is still ongoing, the artist has been focusing since 2014 on canonical works of art history, the artist has been focusing since 2014 on canonical works of art history, which he poetically reflects in a unique technique of overlapping color line mesh as colored pencil drawings on paper. Recently, the works of his renowned "Just Watercolors" series, realized on handmade paper, have also made reference to iconic paintings, thus transcending their inherent self-referentiality based on their potentiated degree of abstraction. The complex, delicate and meticulously executed works on paper blur the boundaries between drawing and painting, being both and at the same time something entirely third. They seem not only to finally dissolve the art-historically longstanding paragone between disegno and colore, but to make it entirely obsolete. Slawomir Elsner skillfully fuses painting and drawing; he is a line painter, oscillating between coincidence and constructedness, between blur and precision.

Elger Esser’s (*1967, Stuttgart) landscape photographs are tranquil moments that seem to belong to bygone eras. Time seems to stand still, and the viewer’s gaze dwells in dreamlike, melancholic landscapes. Detached from both time and place, these scenes of bridges, riverside towns, and sea coasts awaken vague memories and daydreams. Water, light, and architecture merge into one inseparable unity. The lyrical, pictorial language, full of atmosphere and governed by the classical rules of composition, conveys an overall impression of perfect harmony. The pale, delicate colors heighten the impression of being transported into the past.

Toulu Hassani’s (*1984 in Ahwaz, Iran) typical oil paintings are variations of structures that move across the entire canvas and let the beholder’s eye search in vain for a beginning, end, middle, and system. Miniature-like staircase forms are twisted inversely; one isreminded of the representations of helixes. She is often inspired by scientific theories and their abstraction of micro-realm realities as well as, for instance, approaches to physical phenomena like gravitational fields and force lines, or even cartography. Topics like thermodynamics or space-time curvature and their respective visual and mathematicallanguages in the form of density allocations or matrixes are variants that serve to describe the world and the cosmos in abstracted formulas and illustrations. Scientific approaches and models are used by Hassani such that she develops them further with her own formal concepts, following no line of argument but placing the focus on that which cannot beexpected. Never wanting to explain the world, her works only want to complement it for their own sake and stand for themselves.

Candida Höfer (*1944 in Eberswalde) lives and works in Cologne. The artist belongs tothe first generation of the Düsseldorf School of Photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher and is today considered one of the world’s most recognized German photographers. In 1973, she started to study film at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and later moved to Bernd Becher’s class, where she graduated in 1982. Since 1985, her works have regularly been displayed at the Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle. Primarily known are her large-format color photographs of mostly deserted interiors of artistic and cultural relevance. Her large-format interiors of cultural institutions penetrateto the core of these architectural icons and make their temporality tangible.

Leiko Ikemura (*1951, Tsu, Japan), lives and works in Berlin and Cologne. In her yearslong artistic practice, Leiko Ikemura has created a complex, poetic, and internationally acclaimed oeuvre. Her sculptures, paintings, photographs and video works offer a narrative journey through imaginary (pictorial) worlds. Ambiguous and multivalent, ever-changing, compressing and dispersing as well as creaturely, organic, and landscape-related elements seem to coalesce in amorphous configurations. The physical boundaries between image and experiential space are crossed—if not rendered obsolete. The works exude an immanently immersive pull that allows viewers to plunge into the artist’s cosmos of sensory experiences. The figures in her paintings and drawings float in timeless places, disappearing or merging with the background. This fusion is also to be seen in her sculptures, in which body and landscape combine to form hybrid beings, and human and animal hybrids emerge.

Karin Kneffel (*1957, Marl) is one of the leading contemporary German painters worldwide. Born in the western region of Germany, known as the Ruhr area, Karin Kneffel began her artistic career focusing on the post-war architecture of her homeland. Her master studies with Gerhard Richter led her to embrace new techniques and innovative subjects at the time, highlighting her small-scale animal portraits and monumental fruit paintings. Karin Kneffel’s works are characterized by her photorealistic technique and her use of intense, bright colors. In her new series “Face of a Woman, Head of a Child”, Karin Kneffel approaches sacred art from a contemporary and innovative perspective, breathing new life into Christian statues from the 15th and the 16th centuries. For years, the artist has been collecting photographs of statues that represent Madonna and the infant Jesus, capturing the unique expressions and representations of these sacred figures. For the first time, Karin Kneffel deals with portrait painting and explores themes such as motherhood, the subjectivity behind the representation of these universal figures and their human dimension. In doing so, Karin Kneffel not only celebrates the timeless splendor of these religious statues but also invites viewers to contemplate the complex interplay between tradition and innovation in contemporary art.

Daniel Knorr (*1968, Bucharest) is currently based in Berlin, Germany. He gained international recognition when he represented Romania at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Additionally, in 2017, he participated in documenta 14 held in Kassel and Athens. The "Minimal Change" group of works uses resources such as metal or stainless steel to represent the effects of climatic and political circumstances using the raw materials themselves. The stainless metal bends and collapses when exposed to heat, similar to bronze and copper. The series of tents is intended to reveal the condition of human resources. The tent, a temporary makeshift structure made of textiles, is represented by a rigid sheet metal construction and simulates a permanence of this condition.

“I attempt to solve pictures for me, what emerges in the end, I never know. If Irecognize something in the picture while painting that triggers a memory in me that I wasn’t aware of before, it’s finished. This exposed point reverses the painting into something objectively perceptible. My goal is to depict this inspiration as accurately as possible. I do not care what exactly is triggered, what matters is thata connection is created with the viewer.” – Maximilian Rödel
Boundary-dissolving, space-opening and immersive, allowing for associations and yet intangible and concealed, Maximilian Rödel’s (*1984) color-abstracted oil paintings harbor a seemingly effortless complexity and multi-layeredness that allows for fundamental reflections on the Anthropocene. In terms of art history, classically standing in the tradition of AmericanAbstract Expressionism, as it sprouted particularly in New York in the 1940s and 50s with its numerous subcurrents, the artist’s canvas surfaces are treated as a field of vision without a central focal point. Specifically in the large-scale works, the color spaces seem to transcend the recipient’s peripheral field of vision. In the sense of a large-scale and generous application of color as well as a careful compositional construction, which nevertheless follows an intuitive process of creation, clear parallels to Color Field Art become apparent.The heightened formal reduction in turn shares essential pictorial design strategies of Minimal Art of the early 1960s. All these characteristics stemming from the history of abstraction are transposed into contemporary and timeless paintings of glistening beauty and raw, artificial imagery.

Being a photographer in a very paradoxical sense, Ruff calls the medium of photography into question more than almost every other photographer of ourtime. If we were to cast a retrospective glance over his oeuvre of the last twenty years, it would not escape our notice that he is concerned less with depiction in his photography than with undepictability. Thomas Ruff, even called a photographer, often does not use his own camera to create some series of his manifold work. Thomas Ruff’s new series “d.o.pe.” and “untitled#” were created over the past two years. Both series offer abstract pictorial worlds resulting from distinct technical approaches. Using computer software, Thomas ruff generated psychedelic-looking images for “d.o.pe.”, which create an enormous maelstrom effect through fractal patterns in vibrant colors. In parallel, the series “untitled#” was created. For this purpose, Ruff suspended wire structures from the ceiling on a nylon cord against a black backdrop and captured the erratic dance of the light created by uncontrollable pendulum movements. Both the “untitled#” and “d.o.pe.” series convey a mysterious effect. The sweeping forms and movements take over the pictorial surface, Thomas Ruff set the stage for them.

Elif Saydam’s (*1985, Calgary) circular images show details of ornamental Moorish patterns, marble floors, coffered ceilings, or other architectural elements from Spanish Andalusia, but also paradisiacal plants and fruit or details of plastic products from souvenir shops that imitate classic ceramics from another era, for example. The details are mirrored and superimposed, it is difficult to distinguish between what is painted or printed, what was artificially created or actually experienced. The works have been decorated with painted ornaments, flowers or gilded frames on what appears to be a printed surface. Elements appear from Islamic miniature painting, which Elif Saydam has been intentionally using decoratively for some time. This mix of “high” and subcultural aesthetics in the visual language, in which the living environment is composed of a diverse community, is typical for the artist’s way of expression.

Thomas Struth (*1954, Geldern, Germany) is one of the most important artists on the international art scene and one of the leading exponents of the renowned Düsseldorf School of Photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher. His first solo exhibition took place at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in 1980, which has led to an ongoing collaboration to this day. In his artistic practice, Thomas Struth usually works with large format cameras and without digital post-processing, presenting his large-scale photographs to the public purely as they are. His artistic concept is based on a precise and analytical documentation of the interrelations between humanity, technology and nature. The relationship between the viewer and theobject is also one of his main interests. His architectural photographs, in both black-and-white and color, of cities in Europe, the United States, and Asia are cornerstones in the artist’s oeuvre. In 1986, Thomas Struth spent three weeks in Yamaguchi, then one week in Kyoto and one week in Tokyo. Japan offered an opportunity for Struth to extend further his project to photograph urban structures and space. He made a first group of work in Japan that he considered to be of interest, in the district of Shinjuku in Tokyo in 1986, picking up on some of the pictorial devices he had used in New York and in Europe. At the same time, he recognised that working in Japan necessitated a further loosening of a systematic approach to picture making.

In his works, Florian Süssmayr deals with images of memory, with exclusion and belonging, with fleeting moments and the ephemeral. Landscapes and portraits as well as close-ups of places of social neglect and still lifes can be found in his repertoire, mostly in a very realistic manner. The seemingly peripheral becomes the main protagonist and individual images are assembled cinematographically to form pieces of evidence: a characteristic that fundamentally underlies all the works in Süssmayr’s oeuvre. The artist, whose roots lie in the political and cultural underground of the 1980s, uncovers the traces of everyday human life in an archaeological manner and preserves their imperfection and authenticity in oil.
Social deviance, the subcultural and the everyday are his themes and determine the often art-historically referencing motifs of his interiors, still lifes, scribbles, crowds and (self-) portraits. This content-related impression is reinforced by the artist’s painting style. Oscillating between photorealism, gestural abstraction and impressionistic borrowings, the artist is able to create a complex interplay of light and shadow with a few, yet decisive, strokes and omissions, as well as with the help of a restrained color palette, which ultimately leads to an immersive atmospheric composition.

Working across a range of forms and materials, Thu-Van Tran (*1979 in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam) uses her own experience as a cultural outsider– a Vietnamese woman living in France – to explore physical and cultural displacement and the history of colonialism, subjects that have become poignantly relevant in today’s climate. Thu-Van Tran about her “Colors of Grey”: “A surrender between beauty and obscurity”: What the “Colors of Grey” have in common is the layered application of the six pigment colors white, pink, blue, green, purple, orange and the nebulous veil of grey on the picture surface. Lurking behind these colors is a reference to the herbicide Agent Orange, which was used by the US military during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The oxymoron in the title, “Colors of Grey”, emphasizes the ambiguous pictorial effect of these paintings, which on the one hand embody an abstract, gestural painting and on the other point to the cruel effects of these chemical rainbow colors. The saturation of the colors varies. Thus, one seems sometimes closer, sometimes further away from the haze of these multicolored events on the canvas, always oscillating between the opposite poles of sensuous, gestural painting and historical facts.

Chen Wei (*1980 in Zhejiang Province) lives and works in Beijing. He is one of the most important Chinese photo artists of his generation. Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle has been working with the artist since 2010 and is the only gallery in Europe to represent his work. In his photographs, he creates fantastic visual worlds, settings, situations, and isolated spaces, which evoke in the viewer a mixed feeling of fascination and melancholy. Chen Wei consistently seeks to express this sentiment in his iconic, mostly deserted and stage-like images. The urban scenes seem like frozen moments from a movie or memories of a dream, often leaving behind an ungraspable feeling. These fictitious, surreal pictorial creations are based on observations that Chen Wei draws from his everyday surroundings. The formal orientation towards the old masters of painting and photo artists such as Jeff Wall or the Dusseldorf School of Photography remains recognizable in Chen Wei’s latest works. The poetic pictorial composition, in which color, materiality and light are perfectly attuned to one another, invariably stands in the foreground and exerts an immediate effect on the viewer. The socio-political allusion to contemporary life in China only comes to light on closer examination of his works. The human presence is reinforced by its absence.