Britta Rettberg - München

Boban Andjelkovic on Pink Pong My principles remain unchanged: painting is an experience that only fully unfolds in dialogue with the viewer. It is about conscious seeing, intuitive feeling, holistic experience, and intimate engagement. In my current works, this aspiration is condensed into a concentrated exploration of a small format. The motifs grow instinctively from overlays of fragmentary elements on the image carrier. A digital “atlas” that has grown over the years serves as a visual archive: a collection of image quotations, impressions, and observations that find their way from the personal environment into painting. Recurring image elements—such as the swimming pool—function as visual metaphors. The pool, which Hockney has already made iconic, stands here as a symbol for painting itself: immersion, letting go, floating in the medium. For me, the artistic process is both a retreat and a return: a dissolution into the painterly gesture and a simultaneous arrival at oneself. It is comparable to composing music—a multi-layered web of emotion, an interplay of dynamics, rhythm, and tension, between harmony and dissonance. This creates an open space for the new. The new series of paintings moves in a border area between reality and dream. It refers to a dimension of experience that functions not through logic but through sensation. The pictorial spaces are fragmentary but permeated by an emotional connection. Similar to a dream, an impression remains that echoes. The works are based on the logic of dreaming: as a visual translation of inner states. The title Pink Pong refers to a poetic choreography of impulse and reflection. Painting becomes an echo, the surface becomes a body, the small becomes the universe. Between surreal nonsense and poetic truth, every line, every dot tells of moments that know neither beginning nor end.

In her multifaceted artistic language, Youjin Yi unites objective references and abstract, painterly structures. Her works depict landscape spaces occupied by persons, animals, objects or hybrids. Seemingly dematerialized they fuse with their environment, emerge or take shape. Yi regards her works as metaphors for unconscious images and manifestations of ideas. Her art is distinguished by the variation of graphic and painterly qualities and the principle of an open coexistence of opposites. The artist developed a special iconography between the poles of imprints and cultures. The exhibition project @park brings together landscape depictions that reveal Yi’s multifaceted view on nature and her keen sense of composition. In her works, we encounter mountains, trees, and floral motifs arranged in symbolic, dreamlike scenes, and gaze upon natural spaces where mysterious creatures lurk.