Vernissage: Surface Tension – Sedimente von Zeit und Körper von Christina Lena Monschau

"They cover, overlap and conceal each other, come into tension, free themselves in parts and develop their own presence in the process - the images are almost human.", Carla Harter, curatorial responsibility, Café im Bauturm

The exhibition Surface Tension - Sediments of Time and Body deals with surfaces as a dynamic and storing space. Painting and drawing do not appear here as self-contained forms, but as ways and means. Surface becomes a point of contact between inner and outer states. Traces of use and transformation remain inscribed and are transferred into new constellations. What is meant becomes porous, dissolves.

Christina Monschau creates an aesthetic of the processual that does not avoid the unfinished, fragile and changeable, but rather understands it as a basis and mirror. Color, fabric, oxidation and gesture do not form a hierarchical system, but a network of equivalence. A recurring element is the tension between organic and cultural form. Natural processes, decay and textile structures enter into a dialog with constructed orders, art historical references and abstract principles. Her works move between intimacy and openness: partly based on direct, physical experience of the material, partly developed from a reflective distance. In this way, spaces are created in which the clear categorization we have come to love is dispersed.

The spatially conceived movement from figuration to abstraction becomes the performative structure of the exhibition itself. At the vernissage, the dancer Sônia Mota will react to the individual stations with a performance starting at 8 p.m., physically taking up and expanding the transitions. Her body thus becomes a resonant medium between pictorial space, material, time and those present.

Surface Tension describes the fragile zone between form and transformation - as sediments of ongoing processes, as nature and culture know them, and as traces of thinking and being.

We cordially invite you to the vernissage on 11.06.2026 from 19.00 hrs. From 21.00 DJ Kleuser and Febo will be playing.