OSNABRÜCK .- Aleen Solari is an artist and painter. Her artworks bring painting out of its traditional canvas and into the space around us: surfaces, objects, and situations become part of her visual worlds. She links her art to themes that are familiar to many people – drawn from everyday life and pop culture, like music, fashion, teenage slang, or sport. Aleen Solari aims to connect with different groups, such as football fans or pub-goers.
The starting point for Aleen Solari’s exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück is the subcultural space of fan culture and sport. [A subculture is a group within society. Members of the group share a common interest and have their own rules for how they interact with each other.] Her particular focus is on the fan culture surrounding football. Football stands, the sides of the pitch, and clubhouses are places with their own rituals and symbols. People find a sense of community there. They feel like they belong. But at the same time, they are also places of division and exclusion. With her exhibition, Aleen Solari asks: what rules govern these subcultural spaces? What language and gestures influence them?
To answer these questions, the artist focuses in particular on notions of masculinity, physical strength, and competition within football fan culture. As in other social spaces, people are here too excluded– on the basis of their gender, sexuality, or physical appearance. Exclusion can also take the form of hurtful language. This especially affects women and queer people. [The word queer is a term people use to describe themselves. For example, gay men, lesbian women, bisexual, trans, and inter people may use it for themselves.] Aleen Solari critically examines these mechanisms by using found objects, concepts, gestures, and slogans from fan culture and artistically reappropriating them in her work.
One example of this is the title of the exhibition: “Tribute to Bicce”. Bicce is an Old English word for a female dog that is considered the origin of the modern term “bitch”. It has been used as an insult against women since as early as 1400. Today, musicians and activists have deliberately reclaimed the word “bitch” as a term to identify themselves. By doing this, they intend to strip this word of its power. They are stating: I choose what I want to be called. A word that was once offensive thus takes on a new meaning. It can even sound positive or proud.
Aleen Solari (DE) lives and works in Hamburg. She studied painting under Jutta Koether, Anselm Reyle, and Monika Baer at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Her Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Neue Museum Nürnberg (2025), Kunstverein Jesteburg (2023), and Stadtgalerie Künstlerhaus Lauenburg (2022) . Group exhibitions have included shows at LYCRA Raum, Hamburg (2025), Stadtgalerie Kiel (2023), Galerie Meike Bilir, Hamburg (2021), Kunstverein Miagou, Manila, Galerie Oelfrüh, Hamburg (both 2020), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, and the Kunstverein Leipzig (both 2019). From 2024 to 2025, she was a professor of painting in the Department of Fine Arts at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel.
