ZWIELICHT by Ingrid Simons. Special Guest: Poetic encounter with visual artist Manfred Schneider

The title of Ingrid Simons’ solo exhibition, *Zwielicht*, is derived from the German word for the mysterious half-light of twilight. It refers to the transitional moment between light and darkness, when forms begin to dissolve, contours blur, and the world exists somewhere between seeing and not seeing. It is the threshold between two worlds—a fleeting state in which certainty gives way to ambiguity, intuition, and imagination.

This dual meaning makes *Zwielicht* particularly compelling. It is not only a description of a time of day, but also of a mental and emotional state: a space where opposites coexist, where the visible and the invisible, presence and absence, clarity and mystery continuously overlap.

This liminal state lies at the heart of Ingrid Simons’ artistic practice. Rather than representing landscape, she explores it as a physical, energetic, and temporal condition. Spending long periods immersed in nature, she investigates the subtle forces that shape our experience of place: changing light, weather, gravity, movement, and time. Nature becomes both subject and collaborator, leaving its traces within the work.

The exhibition brings together monumental ink works on paper (500 × 125 cm), video performances, intimate drawings on paper—the first to be presented in many years—oil paintings, recent acrylic paintings, and five new textile works created during her residency here in Berlin. Together, they reveal an expanded painting practice in which material, body, and environment continuously interact.

Working with fluid materials such as ink and pure oil paint, Simons embraces processes of construction and dissolution simultaneously. Gravity, viscosity, gesture, and natural forces actively shape the image. Painting becomes not a representation of landscape, but an event in which matter, movement, and time become visible.

Like Zwielicht itself, the exhibition unfolds in the space between worlds. It invites viewers into a realm where landscape is not simply observed, but experienced as atmosphere, energy, and transformation—where seeing gradually gives way to sensing.

• August 6, 6:00 p.m. Opening Reception and Artist Talk by Ingrid Simons 
• August 7, 6:30 p.m. Special Guest: Poetic encounter with visual artist Manfred Schneider 
• August 8, 4:00 p.m. Special Guest: Poetic encounter with writer Dan Ayres
• August 9, 3:00 PM Closing Reception

During opening hours, Ingrid Simons will be present, so please feel free to stop by to connect and chat about art, nature, and the moon. She may also be working on site.

Ingrid Simons (1976) graduated in 1999 from the Academy of Art and Design in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. She is a Dutch visual artist who works in various media: she paints with oil on linen, creates lithographs, silkscreen prints, and photopolymer prints, and works with ceramics, short film, and performance. Since 2022, she has expanded her practice to include works on paper, painting with ink and lacquer.

A defining characteristic of her artistic practice is that she spends half of each year working in international artist residencies.

In 2005 and 2008, she was shortlisted for the Royal Award for Modern Painting, and these works were exhibited at Museum GEM in The Hague (the Netherlands); in 2016, she was awarded the Stipendium for Established Artists (Mondriaan Fund, the Netherlands), and in 2019 she was nominated for the Berlin Prize by the ISPP International Studio & Presentation Program of Livingstone Gallery. In 2020, she was nominated for the International Senefelder Award (Germany).

Simons’ works have been exhibited in public museums, biennials, galleries, and art fairs in the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy, the U.S., Russia, and Japan. In 2020–21, Simons was awarded the Brill Fellowship as an independent researcher by the Scaliger Institute at Leiden University. Ingrid Simons presented her eighth solo exhibition in Portugal in 2023 at the Museu Nacional Frei Manuel do Cenáculo in Évora (Portugal).

Website: www.ingridsimons.com