HAMBURG.- The title of the exhibition references a shade of colour that is distributed across the walls of the exhibition space in repetitions of a large-format, monochrome poster; it could equally be a sound that, as a matrix and a background, lies behind and over everything else on display, making it appear in a different, more complex light.

Another repeated poster motif, showing several reports from the Los Angeles Fire Department documenting operations since 2021, takes the open-ended character of the colour into a more concrete field: the dystopian and disruptive situation in which our world finds itself right now. Although currently the self-destructive dynamics of our modern, industrialised society and the evident ransacking of our basis for life may no longer be the ‘leading’ issue of concern for society as a whole, the current uproar hardly demonstrates that problem-solving strategies and capacities are being well-applied. An increasingly dystopian picture of the future is generated by growing awareness that our ‘free’ lifestyle is being openly challenged by authoritarian societal models; meanwhile, it cannot hide its destructive, harmful character that calls for regulation – and individuals are finding all of this difficult to ignore.

However, and this is typical of Nadine Fecht’s work, the colour shade is also an in-between – a transition which, as an unfinished process, pertains to an open end still calling for further modification.

What is rather unusual for Nadine Fecht is the inclusion of figurative drawings and portraits, which, as a finely drawn group displayed on one wall, examine the aspect of the individual’s personal confrontation with the self and the environment against the background of major, global topics. This sets the two spheres into a complementary relationship. The openness and directness of the motifs and portraits playfully presented here evoke an aspect of ‘future’ that, in this positive setting, counteracts the darker tone of the background.

This contradiction becomes even clearer, indeed obvious in the second group of drawings and collages on the opposite wall: here, the desire for freedom and the capacity for optimism are expressed in a series of seemingly detached and weightless sheets, each of which individually, and even more so en bloc, explores and uncovers new rules and possibilities for creative arrangement, thus projecting a model of more liberal thinking and organisation that ought to be applied more frequently in social reality!

Although the means with which Nadine Fecht stages ‘Between the Black of Olives and Lunar Blue’ in the space initially appear reduced and fully in tune with the forms of classical drawing and works on paper, she achieves a new level of intricacy and complexity with this current exhibition.

In particular, the figurative sheets drawn using blueprint paper – devoted to the very specific theme of female identity, to the interplay between the staging of one's own person and body and self-empowerment, seeking to both confront and escape the demands and requirements of the other’s gaze – create a complex metaphor for the basic categories of showing and seeing. Equally, they are founded entirely in drawing as a form of art and expression.

The grace in the posture and gestures of an Aphrodite sculpture, whereby a certain shrinking timidity meets with an aura of self-confidence, and the wide-open eyes of a portrait drawing create the poles between which the artist spans a tableau of gestures and slogan-like references; with an intimate-personal tenderness, this art always manages to suggest the presence of bigger pictures, and the possibility of contributing to them.

Eric Wunder

(Translation: Dr. Lucinda Rennison)

Nadine Fecht is a conceptual artist who works with the media of drawing, language, script, sound, and video. The idea of material is central to her work. It is always moments of tension that are fixed, without being resolved, and whose poles originate from the fields of social economy, the social assignment of roles and the self-empowerment of the individual. Drawing is Fecht's key to getting into the deepest entrenched social constructs. Fecht's whole creative practice is based on the idea of drawing being an independent work of art; she maintains that a drawing is not just a sketch on paper but rather a practice that continues to expand. She discovered early on that the simplicity and democratic nature of drawing as a medium contains unlimited allure and potential for expression, as well as a sense of poetry, intricacy, and truth that manifests not only linearly on the surface of the paper but also in interaction with other art media.

Nadine Fecht lives and works in Berlin. She studied languages and archaeological drawing at the Humboldt University and fine arts at the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, Kunstmuseum Basel, MAC-UFPA Belém, Brazil, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Brunswick, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Staatliche Museen Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, Akademie der Künste Berlin, among others. She has received various scholarships such as Villa Aurora Los Angeles, Dorothea-Erxleben Programme, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and the "Berlin-Stipendium" of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. In 2014 she was awarded the Will Grohmann Prize (Akademie der Künste Berlin). Her works are part of public collections at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Berlinische Galerie, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n. b. k., the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Brunswick, the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Kunstmuseum Basel. From 2015 to 2017 she taught advanced drawing as a lecturer at the HBK Braunschweig and drawing at the interface with sculpture at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. From 2018 to 2019, she has managed the professorship of the basic drawing class at the HBK Braunschweig. In 2023, Fecht had a deputy professorship in the Class for Experimental Painting and Drawing, Bauhaus University Weimar and was a lecturer in the Studio for Experimental Drawing, Bauhaus University Weimar. She also acted as lecturer for the Studium Generale at the UdK Berlin. Fecht has been Professor of Drawing at the HFG Offenbach since 1 April 2025.