30 Schichten Unlust zur Erbauung

Vernissage, December 7th, at 7 pm

until January, 12th, 2025

open; fridays 2 to 7pm & after appointment

In her exhibition at the Crystal Ball, Elke Graalfs is showing an installative project idea that has developed from her work form and which she has long wanted to realize in the exhibition space. The artist’s works move and combine photography and painting in collages and expansive installations.

For “Good News – 30 Schichten Unlust zur Erbauung”, Graalfs has developed an installation that is similar to her studio situation, focusing on the processual nature of her working strategy and the secondary paths that accompany it. The artist lines the walls of her studio with white paper, as she very often paints her motifs on paper in order to cut them out later and use them for installations. This is very similar to her collage work, which she also continues on the pages of printed books and magazines. In the studio, however, painting is always accompanied by commenting on and implementing other ideas in the margins or on the sides of the large pieces of paper as she works. If motifs are later cut out and new papers are stapled over them, layers also open up in the room, like in a book. Formulated thoughts, political commentaries and drawings emerge like an inner dialog that also packs drafts, incidentals and relations of concepts into speech bubbles and images on the sheets of paper. We see the creative process with its accompanying inner actions, mirroring the artist’s thoughts and feelings. In the exhibition, the artist will show this experiment, creating an almost holistic, structuralist concept in which not only the finished work, but also the path to it, with its difficulties, distractions, side paths and pauses, is of interest. Yes, the pause itself, the not doing, not painting or doing something else that nevertheless leads to the work, can become the subject of a playful investigation. But it can also open up a personal, sensitive context. In Graalf’s installation, she shows the work as if in a book, thus opening up her works to further relationships that surround the artwork like speaking layers and locate it in a sphere of creation, as if it had only just been completed the moment we look at it. This can be found as a recurring motif in Elke Graalf’s works, that she transforms creative, mental processes into spatial adaptations and thus into installations that are as suitable as they are impressive.