Johannes Mueller-Welschof

This exhibition called “59” presents me with a great opportunity to collaborate with Linda Evangaline Smith, whom I got to know as a fellow student at the Learning Connection in Taita.

We wanted to experience, how our different artistic approaches can connect and complement each other in a shared space and find similarities besides our shared year of birth, which inspired the title.

When it comes to my artist practice I experience myself increasingly as a mixed-media person. I enjoy to venture into painting, photography, digital design, printmaking, sculpture, collage/assemblage and also combined techniques.

For this exhibition I chose the Hexagon shape as one overarching theme, exploring it in 2D and 3D and also that space of optical illusions in between. Intrigued by the strong symmetry and balance of the Hexagon I experimented with different ways to contradict and distort that effect. In re-purposing mass-produced, hexagon-shaped acrylic ornaments as both motives and material I found connections to my professional background in textile design and my fascination with architecture and industrial structures.

The occurring elements of repetition and transition also serve as topics, represented in works on display like the painted cityscape, the digital hommage to Rene’ Magritte and my 2016 participation in the NZ-based 100 Days-Project.

Linda Evangaline Smith

There is always the challenge of making what I can see in my imagination happen in real life. The challenge is trying to form my thoughts and mind pictures into art that other people can see. Deciding on media, application, form and size are some of the first things I think about as well as how to actually construct or paint it. The pieces in this exhibition are all screen printed using the same screens in many different ways.

I decided that the circle would become my starting point. I have been using circles to contain my work a lot lately and wanted to see it through to some conclusion. Using print and a set bank of images but an unlimited colour pallet made it possible for me to concentrate on layering, opacity and forming compositions.

When I start I have only a hint of an idea of how it will look when completed. The first few marks are never good and I struggle to continue rather keep on starting again and again. The layers work to obscure and reveal different pictures within the bigger picture. I’m learning when to stop.

Every image has a meaning for me in my everyday life. Some are straight from nature, a leaf from my mother’s garden put over a screen, drawings of plants and shapes as well as digital images that are layered to form a composition.