Featuring: Ivana Jakšić, Verena Landau, Des Lawrence, Jochen Plogsties, Miha Štrukelj, Miriam Vlaming, Julia Weck

Curated by Goran Tomcic.

Ivana Jakšić lives and works in Belgrade and is represented in this exhibition by two paintings: Clara Schumann (whose image appeared on one of the most popular bank-notes, the former 100DM) and Visa (which refers to the artist’s status as a holder of a Serbian-Montenegrin passport).

Des Lawrence’s paintings, drawings and text are usually black and white, and often focus on aspects of history, such as in the diptych painting of the Cuban missile crisis. Lawrence, who lives and works in London, is a graduate of Glasgow School of Art and Goldsmith’s College, and is a recent Abby Scholar in Painting at the British School in Rome.

Miha Štrukelj lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. His paintings have been included in Vitamin P (New Perspectives in Painting) (Phaidon Press, 2002). This exhibition features Strukelj’s paintings of the Chernobyl disaster.

Both Verena Landau and Miriam Vlaming were born in Düsseldorf and arrived in Leipzig in the early 1990s, where they studied at the HGB: the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts. Following a three-year immersion in the techniques of the Old Masters in an art school in Florence, Landau relocated to Leipzig to study painting and graphics with Arno Rink. Her paintings are often interwoven with neo-realistic film-stills, such as from Pasolini movies, thereby amplifying her interest in painterly space. Exhibited here are Landau’s paintings from her Passover series.

Vlaming, who now lives and works in Berlin, studied first graphic and book art with Rink, and then painting with Rink and Rauch. For Vlaming, the painting is an incompletion, the surface flat and soft, with the palette reduced to a chalky quality. Two paintings in this exhibition are from her latest series of works, Living the Dream. Both of these paintings, uncharacteristically for her oeuvre, refer to photographs found while she was living in Columbus, Ohio.

Jochen Plogsties and Julia Weck are both enrolled in graduate studies with Rink and Rauch, and both recently had their first exhibitions in Leipzig. Locally known as a “museum painter,” Plogsties’s paintings are mementos of buildings and monuments that have significant national importance, such as the former East German Parliament building in Berlin, Palast der Republic, a monument to Goethe, and similar structures.