(*1940 Berlin, DE) Financed his studies of architecture at Universität Hannover with dishwashing and selling ice cream, until in 1961 he founded his “Werbezentrale für Totalkunst & Banalismus“, (later: “Kunstpraxis”) and exhibited himself in a glass box as “Timm Ulrichs, Erstes Lebendes Kunstwerk”. He took it from there and became Germany’s – and probably the world’s – first “Totalkünstler“. Among other smart, witty and innovative concepts he was among the first to use his body as object and canvas for his art. In 1963 he walked naked over an empty field during a thunderstorm, just carrying a metal antenna as “Menschlicher Blitzableiter“. In 1979, he spent ten hours between the two halves of a carved giant boulder (“Der Findling“). Tattoos have become part of this artistic practice since 1974, when he had a target handpoked on his breast by a foreign legionnaire of the Spanish Civil War. In 2020 Ulrichs was honored with the Käthe Kollwitz Prize for his life's work. Ulrichs isa pioneer of tattoos in the visual arts and wears a total of five tattoo artworks on his own body.

(*1955 Düsseldorf, DE) Semmer is considered one of the Neue Wilde - she taught Albert Oehlen how to paint with oil paints. She studied under Sigmar Polke in Hamburg and Gerhard Richter in Düsseldorf, followed by an MA at Goldsmiths University London in 1992. In 2015, she was included in ‘The 80s - Figurative Malerei in der BRD” at Städel Museum, Frankfurt and Groninger Museum, leading to acquisitions by both museums.

(*1986) Charlie Stein belongs to a young generation of female painting shooting stars in Berlin. She is obsessed with technology and communication, which has a massive impact on her paintings. She often paints feminine figures reminiscent of robotic entities. Her subjects’ forms are exaggerated, their features stylized, and their poses characterized by a surreal, almost mechanical elegance.

(*1959 Wurzen, DE) Klaus Killisch studied painting at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. His neo-expressive style and his motifs inspired by punk, rock and pop were considered subversive during the GDR era. His style of breaking up and overlapping categories is characteristic of his work. Killisch repeatedly succeeds in presenting complicated themes in painting in an amusingly effortless way. He was invited to the Venice Biennale in 1990 and has had many international exhibitions since then.

(*1992) Olga was supposed to be born in her home in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where she still lives. Instead, she was born six weeks early, when her parents were doing a trip to Neuruppin in Brandenburg, for the first time - “last vacation without child, first one to former GDR”. Her mother’s water broke while she was collecting mushrooms in the forest near the lake. Olga studied theatre directing at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin and fine arts at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. ‘Her poetic, often musically accompanied lecture performances have aspects of ritual and salon culture,’ writes Korbinian Verlag. Her most recent book was “The devil lives in your right eye”.

(*1974 Bad Homburg, DE) “Gregor Hildebrandt is a lover. He loves life, art, film and music, and he generously shares this love with the world through his art”. This world-embracing characterization about this artist was written for his latest show “Kraniche ziehen vorüber” at Perrotin Gallery in Seoul. Hildebrandt transforms analogue data carriers into his paintings and installations. In this way, he creates minimalist works from deformed vinyl, cassette boxes or tapes attached directly to canvas, to which the musical prehistory adds a further, invisible dimension. Chess is one of his other life themes. A recurring motif in his work: the pawn chess piece. Hildebrandt works as professor of painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2015.

Margret Eicher studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. As a concept and media artist, she develops digital collages that are woven in the style of classical tapestries and produces large-format art works. In this way, she configures images of the Internet from different areas into a new whole. She developed the technique of copy collage back in the 1980s. She works with reproductions from variable contexts and combines them into large patterns. Her works can be found in numerous collections such as the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Sprengel Museum Hannover.

Martin Eder's disturbing oil paintings examine the interaction of beauty and ugliness and are shown alongside cute kittens and cuddly puppies, revealing nudes in eerie, surreal encounters. In an almost scientific way, Eder has devoted himself to this since the beginning of his career exploring the illusory possibilities of painting and their meaning. Inspired by various movements of art history, including Baroque and Surrealism, his paintings juxtapose the sentimental, the filthy and the sublime, forming the imagery of the classical history painting new. Eder breaks the generally accepted notions of what "fine art" should be, subverting conventional hierarchies of images and subjects. If you are looking for answers you are out of place in Eder's cosmos. But you will encounter a silent guest – the uncanny.

(*198X Moskau, RUS) Anna Nezhnaya is a visual artist and performer. She has been living and working in Berlin since 2016. With her biographical background in graphic design (Moscow State University of Graphic and Printing Arts) and art history (University of Greifswald), she explores traditional imagery in the context of the present. She examines sacred places in everyday life, spiritual currents in the Western world and their transformation in the recent past. To this end, she elegantly combines digital drawings and paintings with light art to create a visual field of experimentation from which her iconic neon sculptures emerge. Anna's work oscillates between objectivity and abstraction and between manual and digital practices. Her approach often deals with concepts of identity in the post-internet age. With her paintings and light objects, she seeks to make the fine line between physical and virtual reality artistically productive. As a student of the painter Andrej Golder, she also develops experimental painting techniques to create innovative surface structures. In her characteristic works, the artist reflects aspects of a grotesque feminism and explores images of femininity from the fields of mysticism, metaphor and contemporary culture.

Lukas Troberg's work is characterized by an experimental, mostly political discourse with the themes of language and communication. His poem-like works range from multi-lines and single words to complete abstraction, for example through the partial or complete erasure of texts, which makes them all the more visible. He started off as a street artist and his works – as our motif – often draw from or refer to this culture, although becoming ever more abstract and formalistic. Since April 2024, Troberg has held a one-year scholarship at the Villa Concordia in Bamberg, which he received from the state of Bavaria in recognition of his oeuvre. Together with Dominik Annies, he has been running ‘Studio Troberg Annies’ since 2021, which received its initial impetus from winning a competition for the new design of the Austrian Monument Protection Medal.

Kennet Lekko (*1992 Tallinn, EST) is an up-and-coming contemporary painter based in Berlin. Lekko's work is an exploration of contemporary life's most bewildering facets, sharp and playful: a riotous celebration of life's absurdities, In his recognizably colourful visual style Creating a visual language that samples from the vast spectrum of human expression from colouring books and tattoo designs to ancient artifacts and religious imagery, Lekko creates his very own carnival of contradictions, embracing the chaos of contemporary world with open arms and offering an unapologetic celebration of pop culture alongside intellectual satire. But don't be fooled by the whimsical facade; beneath the layers of humor lies a contemplative soul, probing the deeper questions that haunt his generation.

(*1988, Seeheim-Jugenheim, DE) Nadine Kolodziey is an extended or mixed reality (XR or MR) artist based in Frankfurt and Berlin. She works at the intersection of digital and analog, combining materials such as plastic and pixels to create work that is hand-cut, melted or transformed into walkable augmented reality environments. She’s interested in new challenges, deep-diving in AR and doing big-scale installations as well as projects in Japan in the future.

(*1973 Mühlheim an der Ruhr, DE) untattooed. Katharina studied German and English literature at the university of Hamburg and graduated in illustration at the university of applied sciences. She wrote and illustrated fifteen books, which have also been translated into fifteen languages, and does everything with painting, writing, drawing and cartoon-creating.

As an artist, Jim Avignon is one of the most unusual figures in the German art scene and has long been keeping the art establishment in check with comic-like figuration, bright colors, biting wit and a dizzying output. For more than 30 years he is working hard on being the fastest painter in the world, His paintings are a mashup of cartoonish figuration, expressionist composition and dominantly featured titles—always in line with the mantra “a maximum of expression with a minimum of lines.” A lot of people outside the art world know Jim’s work, because British Airways planes adorned with a portion of his East-Side Gallery mural cruised over Europe for some years.

(*198X Bremen, DE) Sascha Boldt studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Albert Oehlen and works as a multi-conceptual artist in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main. Working in a variety of media and in different bodies of work, Sascha Boldt uses his methodical and formal approaches to question our current living environment. In his ‘hybrid constructs’, which are initially created digitally on the computer and finalized with analogue visual techniques, he addresses the fields of association, interfaces, connections and feedback loops of our current life between the virtuality of the metaverse and the associated rapture of humanity from the surrounding physical reality. His oeuvre is characterized by themes such as climate change, the environment/activism, VR & AI, the relationship between digital humans and nature, high-performance society and burnout, as well as the use of social media and smartphones. Sascha Boldts works are currently on view in group exhibitions at the SAP Headquarter and THE SPACE in Hamburg.

American multimedia artist Tracey Snelling combines sculpture, installation, video and photography in her work and has a particular penchant for constructing small building sculptures. She also works with mixed media, such as painting over everyday images and photographs. Her works are/were recently shown in solo exhibitions at Procuratie Vecchie in Venice and at Haus am Lützowpltaz, Berlin.

Christian Awe (*1978 Berlin, DE) was a graffiti writer in the beginning of the 1990ies. He studied at the Berlin University of the Arts with Georg Baselitz and was a master student of Daniel Richter. He teaches at various art academies and was artist in residence at Princeton University (USA). He is involved in several social and cultural projects with a focus on education, health and development. One was to build a school and a hospital in Burkina Faso and dig a seven kilometer tunnel to supply water to the school. Awe lives and works in Berlin and Palma de Mallorca.