Gallery Dam is pleased to feature the German artist 'Astrid Koeppe' drawing exhibition from 12 to 21 July. A motif of Astrid Koeppe's artworks is based on specific experience and observation. She recreates an object to her own marvelous and fantastic space. In her drawings, objets, which look like animal or plant, provide very formative and tactual illusion, and show amazing attraction. Audiences can face with ambiguity of motifs but on one hand, see detailed sketching hair, fabric or thorns. Her drawing makes us to imagine whether it is real or surreal, or natural or supernatural.
Astrid Koeppe has been introduced in Korea 2 years ago when she was the selected residency artist at the Youngeun Museum. In this exhibition, her 20 newest drawings and enamel paintings will be showed.
'My work consists to a large amount of drawing. For more than ten years now, my works on paper are strictly in the same size: A4, portrait format. My drawings are mostly based on things I have actually seen - therefore, being in another country influences my work strongly. What I picture are subjective essences of objects, filtered through my kind of selective perception.
I do not invent forms, but sometimes reduce or exaggerate certain aspects, or compare or contrast it with similar shapes. By doing this, several ways of interpretation open up and I try to keep them as open as possible. In the finished works, the motifs can never actually be resolved entirely; rather, they recall something familiar that can scarcely be summed up in words.
The drawings I find satisfying are at the tipping point, so to speak; the objects shown are settled and unsettled at the same time. This balance between clarity and unclarity, certainty and uncertainty, interests me. In order to retain their ambivalence, my works are untitled on principle.'
By Astrid Koeppe