28.02. - 15.03.2025, Kunstraum Ortloff
An immersive adventure between fiction and existence, an extravagant scenery demands a sensual exploration rather than a rational analysis. Another world unfolds: like a 19th-century salon, the abundant fabric drapes create a boundary that the large-scale paintings of Winnie Seifert and Philippa Brück simultaneously transcend on various levels.
As early as 1853, the renowned French writer Victor Hugo attended séances while in exile on the island of Jersey, firmly believing he was communicating with spirits. Shakespeare, Dante, and mysterious entities such as the Shadow of the Ocean spoke to him. The "tables tournantes" were not only en vogue for Hugo but also for his contemporaries—first on the East Coast of America and soon thereafter throughout Europe.
Long before spiritualist practices like table-turning regained popularity during the Romantic era—that is, after the Enlightenment—the mystic and philosopher Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) from Görlitz sought a different kind of connection to the invisible. His visions and insights into a higher reality beyond the visible resonated centuries later with artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Hans Arp, who sought to capture the spiritual in their works. In a spontaneous moment of revelation, Jakob Böhme recognized God as a binary, fractal, and self-replicating algorithm and the universe as a genetic matrix, born from the existential tension and divine longing for self-awareness. Under this premise, distinguishing between different gods in various religions was inconceivable to him.
Osho, the charismatic, charming, and humorous founder of the Bhagwan movement—a master manipulator par excellence—introduced the New Age movement from India to the USA in the early 1980s. This sect-like formation made its rounds across the globe, establishing a presence not only in India and the USA but also worldwide today. Moreover, we are now familiar with other esoteric phenomena that manifest in broader social and even political dimensions.
The supernatural refers to a higher reality beyond our five senses. Can painting depict more than the visible world? Pliny the Elder described the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, in which both sought to render reality most convincingly. While Zeuxis deceived birds with his exquisite grapes, Parrhasius managed to fool Zeuxis himself with his delicate curtain. Beyond mere imitation, artists of later epochs, such as Caspar David Friedrich, Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Salvador Dalí, aspired to make an invisible dimension beyond reality tangible through color, composition, and atmosphere.
The supernatural in painting, in particular, is the attempt to make the invisible visible—whether through spiritual symbols, abstract forms, intuitive creative processes, or the depiction of the sublime. Beyond the purely material world, spaces open up for personal or collective mystical, spiritual, or transcendent experiences.
A subjective and emotional perception of nature challenges the familiar and awakens the unknown. In her paintings, Philippa Brück plays with the limits of hyper-aestheticization, distorting, alienating, and deconstructing her motifs. Only upon a second or third glance do other organic forms and elements emerge within the floral structures. Between and behind silky, delicate textures, seemingly endless cosmic spheres glow and radiate. Philippa Brück's velvety-surreal visual worlds surpass everyday viewing habits and, in their opulence, resemble transcendent parallel universes.
Winnie Seifert weaves colors and emotions into her paintings, creating personal memories, fleeting moments, and sensitive observations that resonate with all of us. Layer by layer, transparent veils and dense impulses unfold into a synesthetic cartography that oscillates between remembering and discovering. Her color choices follow intuition: deep blue flows into delicate pink, bright yellow flares up like a sudden thought. Spots, signs, and blurred traces conjure an open space where thoughts can drift. A place that does not exclude contradictions but embraces them—a terrain for the unspoken, which only reveals itself through contemplation.
Before, during, and after the Middle Ages, following the Enlightenment, or in the wild seventies—the intangible has always fascinated us. Whether attempting to communicate with higher beings or engaging in dialogue with a cosmic or, more recently, an artificial intelligence. Art has long served as a medium to translate and render otherworldly experiences and encounters tangible.
Isabella Engelhardt and Winnie Seifert
Kunstraum Ortloff
Jahnallee 73
04177 Leipzig
ortloff.org
