ZWIELICHT Vernissage and Artist Talk by Ingrid Simons

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 condition: 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 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.

• 06.08. 18:00 Vernissage and Artist Talk by Ingrid Simons 
• 07.08. 18:30 Special Guest: Poetic encounter with visual artist Manfred Schneider 
• 08.08. 16:00 Special Guest: Poetic encounter with writer Dan Ayres
• 09.08. 15:00 Finissage

During the opening hours, Ingrid Simons will be present, so please feel free to come by to connect and a talk about art, nature and the moon. She might be working on location also.

Ingrid Simons (1976) graduated in 1999 from the Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving, ’s- Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. She is a Dutch visual artist, who works in several techniques: a painter who works with oil paint on linen, lithography, silkscreen printing, photopolymer printing, ceramics, short film and performance. Since 2022 a new direction was added: work on papier, painting with ink and laque.

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 shown at Museum GEM in The Hague (The Netherlands), in 2016 she was granted the Stipendium for Established Artists (Mondriaan Fonds, 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).

Works of Simons were presented in public museums, biennials, galleries and art fairs in The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy, U.S.A, Russia and Japan. In 2020-21 Simons was awarded the Brill Fellowship as independent researcher by the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University. Ingrid Simons presented her eight solo exhibition in Portugal in 2023 at Museu Nacional Frei Manuel do Cenáculo, Évora (Portugal).

Website: www.ingridsimons.com