schärengarten III – OFUTURE zone

schärengarten III
archipelago Garden III
skärgård III

by Manuela Mordhorst

The artwork comes from the Archipelago Gardens series, which was created by Manuela Mordhorst in 2019 directly in Sweden. The annual breaks that the artist spends in southern Sweden, near the island of Öland, inspire her to a wide variety of series that sometimes seem abstract or semi-abstract.

This time, the artist, inspired by the archipelago, islands, the Baltic Sea and vegetation, has created an abstract series whose main theme is the environment. In fact, the artist deals here with nature, the elements, and above all with their structures, which look very different. Surfaces such as rocks, trees and even water mix and are realized by the artist in their own form. The special feature of the paintings from this series is that their canvases were originally soaked with water from the Baltic Sea, and then marble powder and natural materials were used to symbolize the harmony of art, man and nature. This is also reflected in the colors used by the artist, which correspond very closely to the colors of nature.

0,60 ETH

visual artist, painter

Born in 1970 in Bonn, Germany. From 2002 to 2017 she worked as a self-employed photographer in Cologne. She has always had an interest in art in its various forms of expression, as she was encouraged to learn to play the piano, flute and church organ as well as dance and the visual arts in her early childhood. As a teenager, she got to know the world of art by going to exhibitions and learning under the supervision of private teachers.

She has been working as a visual artist, especially as a painter, since 2009, and since 2012 she has regularly participated in individual and collective exhibitions as well as presentations at art fairs. In 2019-2021, she was a board member of the art association Art Projekt in Bruchhausen-Vilse. In 2021, she participated as an Artist-in-Residence, Kunsthaus Stove at the Baltic Sea.

She currently lives in Handeloh near Hamburg and works in her studio in Visselhövede.

Memberships with Kunst in der Provinz e.V. Lower Saxony | BiK
Awards: Artist in Residence, Kunsthaus Stove; Honorable Mention, Envision Arts Magazine (Dallas); Studio Next, Calcutta (India); Oyedrum, intersectional feminist magazine (USA).
The starting point of her works are observations of nature, such as structures and movement in vegetation, water, earth and sky. Intensive confrontation with the diversity of nature always means the penetration of different layers. The delicate boundary between land and sea, between sky and water, and the meeting of elements also touches our boundary between ourselves and the world, and the ever-changing boundary between what is known and what is different. The artist works mainly with natural materials, but also likes those she collects or makes herself, e.g. pigments. She says that the material itself is often a source of inspiration and a driving force to which it must flexibly adapt, so it also combines painting with the art of an object, work on paper with collage and gilding.