Holly Hendry’s sculptures deal with the relation of body and space, interior and exterior. Permeability and morbidity play a major role in her visual language which is characterized by comic-like motifs and humor. Hidden physical modes of operation and mechanisms are made visible and are dealt with in a playful way. Motifs are newly mixed, following a certain inner logic. The results are highly artificial looking sculptural structures. Hendry questions our perception and the separation of physical-chemical processes in the body from the emotional level. Her work is characterized using innovative casting methods and colored materials like plaster, Jesmonite, concrete, chalk, foam, and marble. Wherever a space opens in Hendry’s work, content becomes visible. A tongue falls out of an open yawning maw made of cardboard. Another work shows an open box that allows a view into a stacked interior from which a hand emerges.

Andreas Schmitten’s sculptures and installations have seemingly perfect, glossy surfaces that also imply a hidden emptiness and contradictions. His meticulously crafted small-scale architectural models are full of whimsical details: we encounter oversized empty heads like monuments in an urban space, stairs and ladders leading nowhere, clotheslines and other garden utensils without specific context. Schmitten’s works are humorous, playful as well as melancholic and oppressive while creating moments of irritation. In his works on paper, he also negotiates the relationship between human body and space, including to-pics like violence, control and indifference. The drawings are reminiscent of macabre instructions of use: bodies are sawn up, pierced, appear merged with furniture or architectural elements.

In Anne Neukamp’s paintings familiar motifs and symbols develop a surreal life of their own. Here too, the gaze remains in a limbo on the surface, at an indefinite point between seeing and deciphering. Neukamp places object-like signs – keyholes, ropes, hinges, noses as well as architectural and graphic elements – on almost monochrome surfaces. Thereby she creates a spatial ambivalence, where an assignment of foreground and background becomes impossible. Isolated motivic details are paired with unexpected elements defying a description of functionality. Neukamp’s work invites us to question patterns of interpretation and to allow the existence of things beyond reality.‍‍

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