Maskenball

Paper, cardboard, cut-outs, magazine fragments, ink, watercolour, adhesives, and other mounted on wooden frame.

The Berlin-based artist Nadja Schöllhammer has dedicated herself to working with the material of paper. Apart from her watercolours and drawings in the classical sense, she is known for her expansion of drawing into the realm of three-dimensionality, right up to wall and even through to room installations.

She handles the paper—in that she flays it with the scalpel or scolds it with fire, for example—with both aggression and the flowing tenderness that is integral to her ink drawings. In her relief-like formations, a tension-filled interplay is engendered through the oscillation between exceedingly delicate, acutely precise procedures and her insistence upon playful freedom and an embracing of coincidence. Thus, her art is driven by deliberate planning and reflection but also an eager willingness to experiment. The subject matter of her drawings is informed by the artist’s many journeys abroad, undertaken within the framework of numerous scholarships and grants. Her work addresses the various cultural rites, sagas, myths and singularities of Mexico and Japan. Yet, the fundamental essence is comprised of a particular ambivalence here as well; a certain seediness and a sense of strangeness is concealed behind the beauty. The dulcet, Baroque-semblant, fairytale-like figures end up brandishing hidden knives, and the themes of threatened danger and violence subtly permeate her works. The human comedy and the human drama are closely linked, and Nadja Schöllhammer repeatedly redresses the balance to reveal and produce a wealth of multifarious facets, in content as well as form—whether miniature or spatially commanding.