Christin Wilcken

In the organizer's words:

From light into darkness, from darkness into light

The Kunsthalle Rostock is pleased to present the artist Christin Wilcken with the solo exhibition "From Light into Darkness, from Darkness into Light". This comprehensive show presents 15 series of works with around 100 individual works that have been created since 2011.

The exhibition will be on display from September 21, 2024 to January 5, 2025. Christin Wilcken's nature pieces invite visitors to use the drawings to trace their own perception and gain new perspectives on the relationship between humans and nature.

Christin Wilcken translates artistic themes of experiencing nature since the Romantic period into a contemporary visual language and expands the boundaries of drawing through experimental formats that incorporate space and the viewer's position. She always takes the experience of nature as her starting point, but instead of depicting it, she reinvents it. Fragments of animate and inanimate nature, but also atmospheric phenomena, lead visitors into caves and into the night, to celestial bodies or into fire.

In order to activate the viewer's imagination, she largely dispenses with color. Instead, she uses a soft shimmer, the reflection of ambient light and a broad spectrum of black tones. In these drawings, light often emerges from the deepest black, just as in nature new life is constantly emerging from nothing. She shows us darkness, twilight and twilight as states that allow self-reflection and can also be the starting point for poetry and creation. Those who follow her works no longer experience the relationship between man and nature as a contradiction, but as a part of it.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog of works, with texts by Judith Elisabeth Weiss and Susanne Burmester, designed by Denise Walther from Dresden.

The Kunsthalle Rostock cordially invites all interested parties to visit this first major survey exhibition of the promising artist and to be inspired by Christin Wilcken's nature pieces. At the same time, the Westgalerie is showing the retrospective "Inge Jastram. Time drives me".


Promotion and support
The exhibition is part of a series of exhibitions presenting the work of female artists against the backdrop of current and GDR-era images of femininity. The series is generously sponsored by the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung in cooperation with the OSPA-Stiftung. The Kunsthalle Rostock gGmbH is supported by the Hanseatic and University City of Rostock, the Ministry of Science, Culture, Federal and European Affairs of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and by the association "Freunde der Kunsthalle Rostock e. V.", health partner: Klinikum Südstadt Rostock, cultural partner: NDR Kultur