Blooming #2

Lorin Brockhaus, (*1996 in Freiburg i.B.), studied painting at the HGB Leipzig in the class of Michael Riedel and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the class of Daniel Richter. Lorin Brockhaus creates modular spatial and sculptural objects by layering or stringing together individual images. His most recent group of works, „Starts, Routes, Loopings“, consists of a growing stock of photographic elements printed on acrylic glass, which can be variably connected and arranged in space using plastic holders.

Semi-transparent strips show blurred fragments of landscapes, terrain and weather. Like scale models, they represent views, environments and paths of possible realities and loose timelines. A series of jumps in perspective through locations and points in time that converge, drift apart or run parallel to each other. The view of the observer isn‘t held up by the content of single images. It accelerates as it moves along the routes. Everything merges into a rushed gaze that pauses only in the overview of fixed compositions. Still, an offer of alternative forms and contents hovers above every arrangement. It’s like this, but it could have been different.

Gustav Sonntag was born 1994 in Berlin, today he lives and works in Leipzig and Dresden. Sonntag grew in Berlin, which is with its clubbing culture and urban life until today source and subject in the style and depictions of his art. From 2015 to 2022 he studied at the art academy Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) in Leipzig under Christoph Ruckhäberle where he graduated 2022 with a diploma. With his work Sonntag has already received recognition through exhibitions in Dresden, Berlin, Stuttgart and other cities, a multitude of media coverage (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, MDR, and others), a recent nomination for the STRABAG Art Award 2024 and institutional group shows most recently at Stadtgalerie Kiel (Dissonance, 2024) and currently in Potsdam (‚Gegen den Strich’ - Gen Z in der Kunst, 2024). 

Gustav Sonntag‘s large-format paintings deal with profound and socially relevant themes that explore human existence in the context of urban life. These themes include obsession, addiction, violence, resignation and homelessness and are depicted in vividly expressive figurative paintings. At times the artist takes a detailed and emotional approach to his depictions, making his work both intense and disruptive. This pictorial intensity is achieved with the application of an expressive color palette, fast brushwork and amplified even fur- ther by the use of bold perspectives. This way Gustav’s figurative imagery evokes a sense of forceful confrontation with his subjects but also suggests the authenticity of an in-situ created image. However, derived from the very charged situations and places themselves, such as off corners in late night clubs or sidewalks inhabited by homeless people, the visual narration makes use of surrealist features with bending spaces and shapes, flaring or muted color schemes, pictorial spaces that unravel towards the edges of the canvas, and imprecision in the rendering of items held by the pictures’ protagonists or even their very faces.

Rachel von Morgenstern works on translucent polyester canvases, which are themselves stretched on heavy stretcher frames. With preferably vivid colors and hues of acrylic paint, von Morgenstern develops intriguing arrangements of color and spatiality, transparency and opacity in gentle and dynamic gestures. Her compositions oftentimes appear light and elegant yet determined in the way elements such as gestural brushstrokes or abstract undefined shapes are placed and color nuances chosen. Her painterly pictorial settings brilliantly evoke the suspenseful ambiguity of painting between its very material surface and illusion of pictorial space.

Rachel von Morgenstern lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. After finishing her diploma at the HFG Offenbach in 2013, she continued her studies with a masterstudents degree at the AdbK Karlsruhe. Afterwards she was sponsored with a residency scholarship at the Opelvillen Rüsselsheim. Her works have been shown in solo shows in Frankfurt am Main especially at the gallery Filiale, and in art associations throughout Germany, also she was featured in group shows in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Los Angeles.

Sebastian Hosu (born 1988 in Satu Mare, Romania) grew up in Romania and studied painting and free art in Cluj-Napoca at the University of Fine Arts and Design and at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin (2008-2010). A master’s degree in painting at the Académie Royale des Beaux-arts in Liege, BE, was followed by master’s studies at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Hosu’s works have already received much attention in Germany and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig in 2018 and at the Kunstverein Freunde aktueller Kunst in Zwickau in 2019, as well as solo exhibitions in galleries in Leipzig, Amsterdam, Bucharest and Hong Kong, among others. With paintings and drawings he is already represented in significant private and public collections. His work is presented and collected internationally.

The figurative sceneries in Sebastian Hosu’s paintings appear with vigorous brushstrokes, in gestural allusions to form and bold color compositions, resulting in depictions where the border between representational figuration and painterly abstraction remains almost indistinguishable. The dynamic compositions throw the viewer right into the heart of scenes of sporty action and leisure time activity, in which moving bodies seem to blend in with the surrounding landscapes. In depicting these vivid yet very ephemeral moments, Hosu’s paintings oscillate between painterly contouring and simultaneous dissolution of form. This way the ephemeral nature of the summoned scene is contrasted with the physical presence of the paint and painting itself, inviting the viewer to re-visit and reexperience a moment in time over and over again.