Paloma Varga Weisz @ Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover - "Multiface" Exhibition

Paloma Varga Weisz: Multiface

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

December 7, 2024 - March 2, 2025

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

© Photographer: Ulrich Prigge

The exhibition Multiface is one of the most extensive presentations of works by Paloma Varga Weisz. It brings together her recent series of works with key pieces from over three decades, offering insight into her poetic and simultaneously subversive artistic practice. Her works—sculptures, watercolors, drawings, and installations—delve into existential questions about identity, memory, vulnerability, and transformation. Figures and forms oscillate between the familiar and the foreign, the corporeal and the narrative.

Trained as a wood sculptor, Paloma Varga Weisz deliberately breaks with the tradition of the craft. By mastering traditional techniques while simultaneously subverting them, she creates works that challenge classical notions of materiality and form. Her sculptures combine historical references with surreal elements, humorous disruptions, and subtle irony, impressively exploring the boundaries between artisanal precision and contemporary reflection.

A central focus of the exhibition is Wild People (1998—2024), a series of works ranging from small ceramic figures to monumental bronze sculptures. These hybrid beings, which combine human and animal traits, embody a deconstruction of gender roles and family ideals. They raise questions about isolation, community, and transitions from humans to nature. The sculpture Rug People (2011) plays a special role in this exhibition: Inspired by the story of the former railway station in Folkstone in England from which soldiers departed for battle during World War I, this work reflects on themes such as migration, loss, and the fragility of human stories. For Varga Weisz, this also becomes a quiet homage to her father, who had to flee from National Socialists-occupied Paris during World War II as a Jewish refugee. Rug People (2011) functions as a monument to the resilience and vulnerability of human experiences.

Multiface (2019), a multi-faced silver head that looks in all directions, symbolizes the fluid boundaries of the self and the constant changes of life. The multiheaded nature of her works invites viewers to understand identity not as a selfcontained unit, but as an open, evolving structure that sees breaks and transitions as essential components of being. Multiface reveals the complexity of the human—not as an ambivalence to be overcome, but as its essential strength.

Paloma Varga Weisz (b. 1966 in Mannheim) is a sculptor, graphic artist, and painter. After training as a wood sculptor from 1987 to 1990 in Garmisch- Partenkirchen, she studied under Tony Cragg and Gerhard Merz at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1990 to 1998. Her works poetically and subversively engage with themes such as identity, memory, and transformation. Varga Weisz lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Curator: Alexander Wilmschen

KESTNER GASELLSCHAFT

Goseriede 11, 30159 Hannover

www.kestnergesellschaft.de

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju @ Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover - "BloodLetter" Exhibition

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju

BloodLetter 

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

December 7, 2024 - March 2, 2025

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju 

V. & Blue Tree, 2024

Courtesy of the artist, PSM, Berlin and private collection

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju 

Grandpa’s Balcony, 2024 

Courtesy the artist

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju

„(No) Fear”, 2024

Courtesy the artist, PSM, Berlin, 

and The Yelmani Collection

“breeze blocks, bare toes, dripping water,

peeling turquoise, eyelet lace dancing on concrete.

morning prayers on the roof,

after-school tutoring on the balcony,

movie nights in the parlor.

oh man.

grandma buried in the backyard, next to the other wives,

drying clothes spread out across the lawn like a fleet of warm shadows.

to know you is to love you.”

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, 2024

BloodLetter is the first institutional solo exhibition by the Nigerian-American artist Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju. At its heart is the artist’s book of the same name, a handcrafted leather-bound work made specifically for the show at the Kestner Gesellschaft. This book forms the conceptual core of the exhibition and embodies key motifs that shape the artist’s practice: ancestry, memory, grief, healing, and the complex connection between individual and collective narratives.

Serving as much more than a collection of texts, BloodLetter functions as a personal archive. Poems, essays, letters, and journal entries address questions of identity, belonging, and migration: autobiographical reflections intertwine with universal themes including intergenerational trauma, resilience, familial ties, and cultural transformation. The book is presented in the exhibition within a specially designed installation made of clay elements called “breeze blocks,” inspired by the cement blocks used by her grandfather in the construction of his home. This pavilion creates an intimate space within the exhibition itself, both protective and porous, while also highlighting the artist’s book as both a physical and conceptual center of the exhibition.

The exhibition focuses on Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju’s large-scale paintings on leather and small sculptures made of birch, whose symbols and personal motifs expand the thematic range of the exhibition. Ilupeju combines painting, installations, and text in her practice, making visible the fractures and overlays of memory through unconventional media and surfaces modified with scratch marks and pyrographic techniques. Her works link personal and collective narratives, questioning traditional archiving while opening spaces where stories can be told in depth. In particular, the relationships with her family and thoughts on homeland and diaspora are a common thread throughout her works.

The title BloodLetter refers on one hand to the central role of blood as a metaphor in Ilupeju’s work. For the artist, blood signifies life, connection, trauma, and the transmission of stories. On the other hand, “Letter” points to recorded written and spoken language, asemic writing, the documentation and reshaping of narratives. Together, the interplay of these ideas creates an artistic concept that explores the relationship between body, language, and history.

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju (b. 1996) is a multimedia artist and writer. In her paintings, texts, performances, and installations, she balances her own experiences of connection, violence, and healing with broader considerations of cultural distortions and identity. Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju lives and works in Berlin.

Curator: Alexander Wilmschen

KESTNER GASELLSCHAFT

Goseriede 11, 30159 Hannover

www.kestnergesellschaft.de

Kunstverein Hannover Award Winners Exhibition - Ole Blank, Lena Marie Emrich, Pablo Schlumberger, Tugba Simsek, Catharina Szonn @ Kunstverein Hannover

Kunstverein Hannover Award Exhibition

Ole Blank, Lena Marie Emrich, 

Pablo Schlumberger, Tuğba Şimşek, 

Catharina Szonn

Kunstverein Hannover 

August 24 — October 6, 2024 

Kunstverein Hannover has been running a residency program for young artists for over 40 years. At the end of the program, their newly created works are shown in an exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover - this time not by three artists as usual, but by five.

The one- and two-year scholarships, which have been awarded since 1983, support artistic development both through project funding and by providing living and working space. The Kunstverein Hannover Award, with its regional and national focus, is supported by the Kunstverein Hannover, whose premises are made available to the scholarship holders for a final exhibition.

Information on the artists and the works on display

PABLO SCHLUMBERGER

In his artistic practice, Pablo Schlumberger (born 1990 in Aachen, lives and works in Düsseldorf) draws on various (art) historical epochs as well as high and pop culture. His works in the fields of sculpture, drawing, painting, installation and media art deal with the question of representation and perception in a humorous way. After completing his studies at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts in 2018 under Andreas Slominski, his works have been shown in Cologne, Münster, Hamburg and Varese (Italy), among others. In 2023 he received the Neustart Plus scholarship from the Stiftung Kunstfonds. In 2020 he was a fellow of the Residence NRW+ program in Münster and received the Kunstverein Hannover Award. 

Pablo Schlumberger 

Die Enthüllung (Messerwerfer), 2024 

Oil and pastel on canvas, 200 × 180 cm, detail

Courtesy of the artist

Pablo Schlumberger 

Die Enthüllung (Messerwerfer), 2024 

Oil and pastel on canvas, 200 × 180 cm, detail

Courtesy of the artist

Pablo Schlumberger 

Die Enthüllung (Messerwerfer), 2024 

Oil and pastel on canvas, 220 × 180 cm, detail

Courtesy of the artist

Pablo Schlumberger 

Sketch, 2024 

Courtesy of the artist

As if he had just escaped from the circus ring, the Messerwerfer (knife-thrower) performs on stages in several exhibition spaces at the Kunstverein. Confrontational and playful at the same time, the figure establishes a connection to the outside world. The stages appear staged and artificial, the double staging in the exhibition space takes on an initially absurd appearance. In a combination of painting and installation, an absurd profession seems to be addressed, that of an entertainer, a showman - humorously displayed here in all its irony.

TUGBA SIMSEK

Tuğba Şimşek (born 1986 in Grünstadt, lives and works in Hanover) draws on lived experiences, feelings, fragments of memory, places and everyday observations in their contradictory nature. She studied at the Braunschweig University of Art, where she graduated in 2019 as a master student of Olav Christopher Jenssen. She also studied at the Freie Kunstakademie Mannheim, the Metropolitan University of Art and Design Cardiff and the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles. Tuğba Şimşek's work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, and in 2022 she received the Kunstverein Hannover Award. She has been awarded various scholarships, including Atelier auf Zeit, Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (2021).

Tuğba Şimşek 

o. T., 2024 

MDF, blackboard paint, chalk, 34 × 26 × 1 cm

Tuğba Şimşek 

Mosaics (from the series Himalaya), 2023–2024 

Wood and small, hand-cut mosaic stones, 33.5 × 26 × 1 cm

Tuğba Şimşek records what she perceives in her surroundings casually, sometimes with her eyes closed, but always intuitively. Drawing has become a habit for her, a diary - a natural sequence of movements. In her new installation at the Kunstverein, the black circles on the walls look like targets - and the powdery colors provided look like an invitation: visitors are invited to participate in a large chalk painting and to see the black targets as deep wells of happiness into which something is thrown. The collective process leads to a joint product that is left to change and chance. Elsewhere, Tetris bricks - based on childhood memories - seem to glide across a huge, jet-black blackboard wall: the paused representation of a video game that stands for the childhood and youth of an entire generation. At the same time, childhood is the stage of life in which lack of intention, whether in play or in boredom, drives one's own creative work. The combination of biographical elements, subconscious images and involuntary action are brought together in Tuğba Şimşek's working method.

CATHARINA SZONN

Catharina Szonn (born 1987, Großenhain) studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, the Iceland Academy of Arts Reykjavik and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her expansive installations, she poetically questions and updates the relationship between man and machine, progress and transience. Her artistic practice touches on philosophical themes and integrates text and language. Catharina Szonn has taken part in exhibition projects such as the European Media Art Festival Osnabrück (2019) and has shown her work in solo exhibitions in Amberg, Constance and Frankfurt am Main, among others. In 2022 she received the Kunstverein Hannover Award, and in 2023 the research grant for visual arts from the Berlin Senate Administration. 

Catharina Szonn 

Note on the subject of the society of decline (Oliver Nachtwey) 

Courtesy of the artist

Catharina Szonn 

Eternal Exercise, 2024

Film still 

Courtesy of the artist

Catharina Szonn 

Eternal Exercise, 2024

Film still 

Courtesy of the artist

Catharina Szonn 

Eternal Exercise, 2024

Film still 

Courtesy of the artist

Catharina Szonn's work at the Kunstverein, which borrows from elements of skittles, presents a more or less dysfunctional machine: it raises and lowers itself, sometimes with great effort, and seems to train itself with each attempt; the cumbersome movement illustrates wear and tear. The machine acts as a performer, making the redundancy of its actions visible in seemingly endless repetitions. The movements are accompanied on LED displays with poetic comments such as this: "Time is running and with it the distance that spreads between a beginning and an end. Please don't go away. Change your mind and stay. More important than the show is that the future is certain. I want you to love me."

LENA MARIE EMRICH

Lena Marie Emrich (born 1991 in Göttingen, lives and works in Brussels, Göttingen and Berlin) deals with the physical and the linguistic, with spatial and human exchange in her artistic practice, which interweaves performance, documentation and sculpture. Lena Marie Emrich's works and collective projects have been exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Bergen, Leipzig, Düsseldorf and Milan, among others. She has been working as a stage designer at the Schaubühne Berlin since 2022. In 2020 she won the Toy Award of the Berlin Masters Foundation, in 2022 she was awarded the Kunstverein Hannover Award. In 2023 she received the Neustart Plus grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds. Her works are represented in collections such as the Burger Collection, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Arndt Collection and the Marval Collection. 

Lena Marie Enrich 

Process documentation photos 

Courtesy of the artist

Lena Marie Enrich 

Process documentation photos 

Courtesy of the artist

Lena Marie Enrich 

Process documentation photos 

Courtesy of the artist

Lena Marie Enrich 

Process documentation photos 

Courtesy of the artist

The curved shape of Lena Marie Emrich's Gossip Chairs, an installative ensemble on Sophienstraße that invites people to take a seat, means that although the people sitting on them are facing in different directions, they are nevertheless facing each other and are aware of each other. The result is a staged or forced closeness that becomes a game between intimacy and conversation on the one hand and confrontation with strangers, observing and being observed on the other. Whether tête-à-tête or ménage-à-trois - each of the sculptures tells a different story and encourages viewers to engage in shared conversations. Moral questions are addressed based on the shape of the serpentine. 16 texts selected by the artist and accessible via a digital archive are available via QR codes.

Lena Marie Emrich's practice is a symbiosis of sculptural and fragmentary poetry. The wall works "I Heard Only Good Things" and "Rumors Do Not Fall From The Heavens" allude to the ambivalence that gossip brings with it. Although it has negative connotations, gossip accompanies us in our everyday lives: at work or on our nightly rambles, on social media and in other media. The cliché that labels gossip as typically female has misogynistic connotations - and at the same time, it was long the only form in which women could express themselves uncensored on critical topics.

OLE BLANK

In his multimedia practice, Ole Blank (born 1990 in Lübeck) uses social, cultural and natural commonplaces as conceptual starting points, which he translates into poetic and allegorical images in space. Since graduating from the Braunschweig University of Art in 2017, his work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in Romania, the Netherlands and Germany. Locally, he has been involved in projects such as the Absent Academy and the Niki Residency Program in Hanover. In 2022 he received the Kunstverein Hannover Award. As a fellow of the residency program Fusion:Air 2024 (Romania) and guest artist at the Hertz-Labor (ZKM Karlsruhe), he deepens his practice in the context of transdisciplinary interferences between art, science and technology.

Ole Blank 

Sketch, 2024

Courtesy of the artist

In a sound archive created especially for the new work at the Kunstverein, the artist collected acoustic recordings of beaches, bays and dunes on the various seas of Europe.

The composition begins with the cries of seagulls in the early morning and ends with a cicada concert in the late evening - with the sound of the sea always present. Voices or other references to possible locations are deliberately omitted. The new sound work Wave Room is an attempt to create a surreal phonogram that compresses the European continent in space and time in such a way that it can be explored or at least imagined in its entirety. The result is a contemplative soundscape that can only be experienced through listening.

Previous award winners

2022  Ole Blank, Tuğba Şimşek, Catharina Szonn

2020  Lena Marie Emrich, Sven-Julien Kanclerski, Pablo Schlumberger

2018  Till Wittwer, Lukas Zerbst, Luise Marchand

2016  Isabel Nuño de Buen, Claudia Piepenbrock, Julian Öffler

2014  Laura Bielau, Susann Dietrich, Christian Retschlag

2012  Arno Auer, Ingo Mittelstaedt, Toulu Hassani

2010  Samuel Henne, Fabian Reimann, Anahita Razmi

2008  Özlem Sulak, Sebastian Neubauer

2006  Claudia Kapp, Jacqueline Doyen

2004  Stefan Jeep, Ho-Yeol Ryu

2002  Thomas Ganzenmüller, Antje Schiffers

1999  Hannes Kater, Bjørn Melhus

1997  Hlynur Hallsson, Petra Kaltenmorgen

1995  Christoph Girardet, Anette Ziss

1993  Bernhard Büttner, Aernout Mik, Michael Stephan

1991  Jörg Lange, Brigitte Raabe, Sabine Wewer

1989  Andrea Ostermeyer, Gabriele Regiert, Brigitte Vickers

1987  Friedhelm Falke, Karl Möllers, Siegfried Pietrusky

1985  Petra Rosenthal, Rolf Sextro, Volker Thies

1983  Rüdiger Barharn, Ralph Kull, Klaus Goulbier

The Kunstverein Hannover Award Call for Entries

The call for entries for the next award is online.

Information on the website of the Kunstverein Hannover:

https://www.kunstverein-hannover.de/en/programme/1418-preis-des-kunstvereinshannover

Applications must be received online by the Kunstverein Hannover by September 22, 2024.

Overview of the three scholarships

Lower Saxony Scholarship (January 2025-December 2026)

The two-year Lower Saxony scholarship is awarded to freelance artists who have completed a university degree and are aged up to 35 (at the time of application) and who live or were born in Lower Saxony or Bremen.

Lower Saxony Scholarship for Young Artists (January-December 2025)

The one-year Lower Saxony Scholarship for Young Artists is awarded to freelance artists up to three years after graduation who live or were born in Lower Saxony or Bremen.

National Scholarship for Young Artists (January-December 2026)

The one-year National Scholarship for Young Artists is awarded to freelance artists up to a maximum of three years after graduation who are resident in Germany.

KUNSTVEREIN HANNOVER

Sophienstrasse 2 — 30159 Hannover

www.kunstverein-hannover.de

Roee Rosen @ Kunstverein Hannover — The Kafka Companion to Wellness

Roee Rosen: 

The Kafka Companion to Wellness

Kunstverein Hannover 

November 9, 2024 — January 12, 2025 

ROEE ROSEN

Kafka for Kids, video still, 2022 

© the artist, 2022, courtesy the artist

cinematographer: Avner Shahaf, 

still: Goni Riskin

The Kafka Companion to Wellness is artist ROEE ROSEN’s first solo exhibition in Germany in nearly a decade. Given today’s politically charged cultural landscape, it seems almost self-evident to show an artist who does not shy away from difficult subjects, but at the same time does not exploit them for effect or approach them insensitively—consequently ensuring that difficult topics are neither robbed of their depth nor simply skimmed over on a populist surface level.

Roee Rosen’s distinctive feature is that he does not take a single position on past events, but instead invites us to see past and present events through the eyes of the many figures who populate his practice, himself included. The exhibition brings together work from the mid-1990s to the present.

Co-curated by Krzysztof Kościuczuk 

KUNSTVEREIN HANNOVER

Sophienstrasse 2 — 30159 Hanover

www.kunstverein-hannover.de

Monika Baer @ Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover

Monika Baer
Große Spritztour
Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
Through 13 november 2016

Monika Baer

CMYK | 2016

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Weiss, Berlin

The Kestner Gesellschaft presents the exhibition Große Spritztour by the German painter Monika Baer. The focus of the exhibition will be three new series of works that share the common theme of alcohol. They will be supplemented with numerous paintings, drawings, and collages from the past two decades.

Monika Baer

L | 2014

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, Museum purchase, 

Wachenheim Familiy Fund, M.2014.16

Monika Baer humorously uses various approaches to painting: figuration and abstraction, supposedly expressive gestures and sensitive details seem to compete with one another. At times the narrative potential is emphasized, and at others the material literalness of the picture; at times the canvas seems like a window on the world, and at others like an object in the world. This tension is evident within individual pictures as well as between series of works: in the large-scale alcohol series, the canvas becomes a stage along whose lower edge hyperrealistic bottles are arranged in rows like actors. In the background expressive painting forms a kind of scenery.

Monika Baer

Überlieferung verpflichtet | 2014

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, and Greene Naftali, New York

While the large canvases make use of realistic depiction and a light color palette, the mid-sized alcohol pictures are dominated by an iridescent black that seems like negatives of the light-colored series. Stenciled labels from alcoholic drinks float on the dark background; here and there they encounter dabs of paint applied directly from the tube in pastels, mirrors, thickly applied flecks of color, and rainbow motifs. These two series juxtapose light and dark, illusionistic and emblematic representation, pictures and text. Both are also suffused with a tension between things and symbols. In the third, small-scale alcohol-themed series, this tension is again accentuated: miniature bottles of various kinds of alcohol are depicted along the outer edges of the paintings. In this way, the painting oscillates between referential and literal systems of reference.

Monika Baer

on hold (dregs) | 2015

Privatsammlung

The exhibition shows Monika Baer’s continually developing vocabulary and augments it with drawings and collages that have formed their own universe in her work. In the most recent series, however, drawing appears as a disorienting element on the canvases: drawn heads of animals and people emerge from the expressive backgrounds like hallucinations, or sit like graffiti on the canvas. As part of the world portrayed in the picture or as an external commentary, the drawings here are additional figures of the dialectic reversals that the painter encourages her audience to make.

MONIKA BAER studied under Alfonso Hüppi at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1985 to 1992. Her works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (2005), the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2006), and Documenta 12 in Kassel (2007), among others. Major retrospectives of her work were presented most recently in the United States in 2012 at the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2014 at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown. Monika Baer lives in Berlin and teaches at the Milton Avery School of Fine Art at Bard College in New York and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.

The exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft was developed in cooperation with the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. A catalog will be published in German and English.

The exhibition Monika Baer: Große Spritztour is supported by the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the Stiftung Kunstfonds, and the Friends of the Kestner Gesellschaft.

Curator: Christina Végh
Assistant curator: Milan Ther

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover
www.kestnergesellschaft.de