Hiromart Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Still Alive, and exhibition of new oil paintings and drawings by Hamburg-based Artist Claudia Ahlering. This is Ahlering's second solo show with Hiromart Gallery following her well-received debut show in Japan held last year.

Concept: Still Alive
The most powerful moments in life are birth and death. The concept central to this body of work is the old European painting genre, Still life. Along the borderline between tradition and postmodernism, I explore ways of expression through images as if a lyrical story. In my work, the human body appears in the shape of living still life, posing, pending, a subject feeling too alive to surrender to aging and mortality; loving life too much to submit itself to the inevitability of growing old and the consequent loss of beauty and vitality. The subject is surrounded by the world's beauty, which it may be embodying itself. The attributes of nature and the human countenance are evident in form of Apollonian beauty and balance. Vitality and resignation appear as opponents, creating tension in visible perception.

Artist Statement
I love the old masters as much as the modern painting. Residing in 'realistic art', I am focusing on the possibilities of artistic expressions in figurative paintings. Incapable to invent by applying the medium of painting, I rather observe and filter my interests to then give back. In contrast, by drawing I am inventing things without any limits. Here, I am as fictional as I can be. Both forms of expression are used in a very different way from one another. But both are necessary for me to reflect upon life.