Idyll

IDYLL. Isabell Kamp / Fabian Friese

May 14 – July 9, 2023

Atmospheric installations, ceramic body forms and dreamlike stage designs: the IDYLL exhibition will present selected works of the Luise Straus Prize winner of the LVR, Isabell Kamp (*1980 in Bonn), and the Max Ernst Grant holder of the City of Brühl, Fabian Friese (*1994 in Leverkusen).

While Isabell Kamp interprets the medium of ceramics in a contemporary way with surreal sculptures and objects, supplementing them with materials like wood, metal, rope, fabric or everyday objects, Fabian Friese creates atmospheric worlds of illusion in his expansive works with moving pictures, plants and alienated furnishings.

With the linking title IDYLL, Isabell Kamp and Fabian Friese allude to utopias and reveal the wish of people to lull themselves in illusions. Their unusual works allow visitors to submerge into new worlds: the familiar and the disturbing, dream and reality blur.

Isabell Kamp

Entangled wrists and fingers pointing nowhere that lead a peculiar inner life: with her works, Isabell Kamp embarks on a search for a visual equivalent to interpersonal communication. She often reflects on conflict situations and interactions that come to nothing. She uses the ceramic material deliberately to show the human body in its presence and fragility.

Isabell Kamp completed a course of study at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design between 2003 and 2008. She has been represented in national and international exhibitions since 2004. The artist was distinguished with the Luise Straus Prize of the LVR for her work in 2022.

With the prize, which is awarded every two years, the LVR honours “outstanding works in the field of fine arts” and commemorates the art historian Luise Straus, who was deported to Auschwitz at the beginning of July 1944 and murdered there. The first wife of Max Ernst influenced the cultural scene in Cologne with her curatorial and journalistic work.

Fabian Friese

In his installations, Fabian Friese weaves quotations from the history of culture and architecture. He creates fascinating and alien worlds of illusion with dramatic light and audio effects. Design classics with an altered scale or plants that spread out in the exhibition space are removed from their context and combined in a novel way. The scenery-like stagings offer immersive experiences and cause our own perception to totter.

Fabian Friese studied Fine Arts as of 2015 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was distinguished in 2021 with the title “Meisterschüler” (master student) by Professor Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. His atmospheric installations unanimously convinced the jury of the Max Ernst Scholarship of the City of Brühl.

The City of Brühl inaugurated a prize for the advancement of young emerging artists in 1971 on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Max Ernst. Over the years, the Max Ernst Scholarship has developed into an advancement award with an international circle of applicants.