I grew up among biographies of lost dreams in the Ruhr area. In our working-class families, they were buried, put aside or stolen. Over the years, the space in some people's heads became narrower and narrower. Minds became heavier, the world big and overpowering and the small space of the familiar became a safe bastion. For my generation, access to education seemed to open up another world. I vowed to do things differently. I wanted to defend my dreams, wanted to see many things, understand many things. Never to ignore life. I wanted to prevent the space in my head from narrowing, from being taken in by the dreary nature of the adult world and from losing the imagination for alternatives, utopias and dreams. I wanted a different world for the adult I would become. That's why I chose art. The present has now caught up with me. I have grown up, and with a growing understanding of our world and the processes of life, a fine coating, like dust on the furniture, has settled on my dreams.
In my painting I dedust them and continuously reactivate my own ability to form dreams, to surrender to play and to be able to imagine alternative scenarios. My works create spaces that can be found deep within ourselves. They carry with them a silence that can block out the grey noise of the world. They intervene in the actual space and change it so that a reality emerges that goes beyond the mundane, that sometimes has a magical effect. my pictures can give rise to new narratives or reactivate things that were thought to be lost. They are narrative works that create a bittersweet utopia of our present, refusing a sober contemplation of our existence and giving us serious play as a tool to deal with our lives and our uncertain present. The starting point for my painting is diverse, it is arbitrary and specific at the same time. It becomes a trigger, which in its own way contains something fantastic and which manages to lead my imagination to something I didn't know I would or could find before. Something found, such as an object, a structure, a place, can activate the process of visual realisation or it can result from an encounter with people or stories.
I always work on several paintings in parallel so that the works enter into a dialogue with each other. Visual language, motifs and colourfulness relate to each other and a common cosmos, a narrative, develops across the individual works; over time, the utopia that they create has developed into its own present, from which they also partly develop themselves. Colour is of explicit importance for my work. In combination with the effect of light, it is the first starting point for me, the phantasm that draws my attention to an object. In painting, I can influence and direct colour moods. I can borrow them from reality, I can reproduce and condense them or I can use them to transform, alienate and thus transform reality into alternatives. It serves me as a tool to combine the real with fiction and to place a level of sensation in the works that cannot be communicated through words. This forms the entrance, the walls or the roof of the bittersweet utopia that my pictures offer - depending on what is needed at the time
