With works from 20 participating artists, the exhibit opened on the weekend of June 15th – 17th in Wunsiedel’s Old Town and in Wunsiedel’s Partner City Ostrov nad Ohrí.
Download the complete program here >> Opening Weekend Program
THE ARTISTS | Gilbert Geister, Köln
Gilbert Geister, born in 1973 in Bochum, studied Fine Arts at the College of Arts in Berlin from 1996-2000. Afterwards he received teaching appointments at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences and at the Alanus College in Alfter. In 2014 he won the Art Award from the Association of German Architects in Dortmund.
Gilbert Geister lives and works in Cologne.
Gilbert Geister presently concentrates on Object Painting and Drawing, with emphasis on portraits. A traditional portrait, however, becomes revised and modified through both focused and deliberate elemental ommisions, removal of parts of the medium, or through the use of LEDs, lumenescent material or kinetic elements.
Geister’s connection to painting is maintained through such projects as painting through the use of remote-controlled helicopters, machines, or balloons, which, like other spatially-concerned installations, he builds himself.
Geister incorporates audience participation in interactive projects such as his turf slingshot, a line generator, and a cable car.
THE ARTISTS | Feng Lu, Berlin
Feng Lu was born in 1979 in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Between 1995 and 2007, he studied visual and graphic arts in Harbin/China, Berlin, Mainz, and Halle. He also successfully completed studies at the University of Arts in Berlin with distinction. Feng Lu lives and works in Berlin.
Contextual shifts, metamorphoses, and transferrals of meaning are all Feng Lu’s specialty. No social topic is spared when he distorts human actions with angry irony. Feng Lu does not create narrations but combines fragments of situations, memories, and contemporary issues into a critical perspective on society and on being human.
His plastic figures, handmade to perfection, are witty and colorful, playful and frivolous. At the same time, he deals with a variety of motifs and pictures which are not abstract, but allow themselves to be seen from several perspectives. He combines contradictions into singularities that seem self-evident and defies natural science by crossing dimensions or cloning strange creatures.
Feng Lu is a painter as well as a sculptor and ingeniously combines both disciplines in plastic, which he creates out of clay and epoxy resin.
THE ARTISTS| Matthias Berthold, Hamburg
Matthias Berthold, born in Lübeck in 1964, studied Enthnology and Illustration in Hamburg. A graphic and visual artist since 1992, he received a grant from the Robert Bosch Company and was a guest artist in Ireland and Iceland, among other places. He increased his public artistic activities in 2005. Since 2007 he has developed collaborative art projects in cooperation with Andreas Schön.
The artist creates and executes his projects and actions from a critical social perspective. He finds that contemporary and modern art must close the gaps in social rifts instead of deepening them.
The goal is the creation of positive connections – between people, groups, places and art. Berthold’s works fulfill certain social responsibilities by being available and accessible for all people.
Liveliness and changeability are aspects of his artistic works, which bestow a human dimension to the places in which they are located. The directives that he established for the Wunsiedel Water Games are difficult to ignore.
THE ARTISTS | Helga Lang, Hamburg
Born in Bremen in 1961, Helga Lang studied at the College for Art and Music in Bremen from 1983 to 1988 and graduated with a degree in Free Art, Graphics and Film. From 2003 to 2013 she was a lecturer at the Academy for Fashion and Design in Hamburg.
Helga Lang lives and works as an independent artist in Hamburg. Her works can be seen individually as well as in groups.
The artist devotes herself to water as a motif in painting, photography, and space installations. Her paintings are characterized by the structure of water, sometimes calm, sometimes rough and turbulent. She employs a very special technique in recreating the water’s surface.
In searching for just the right shade of blue, Helga Lang always discovers new nuances in color. She can recreate water surfaces by dabbing enamel in a way that mimics the water’s sparkle. Depending on how the light falls, her paintings look different, just as water would, which gives off a different color blend depending on the positioning of the light source and surrounding colors.
THE ARTISTS | Albrecht Fersch, Berlin
Albrecht Fersch, born in 1970 in Schweinfurt in Unterfranken, studied at the Academy of Art in Munich from 1993 to 1995. Between 2005 and 2006 he completed the “Essential Theater” training program in Berlin. He lives in Berlin and works as an art therapist and independent artist.
Along with various grants and scholarships, Albrecht Fersch has also received the “Kunstpreis Östliches Sauerland”.
Albrecht Fersch is a performance, kinetic and installation artist from Berlin. He switches back and forth among the different disciplines and also enjoys working with poetry and musical media. Whatever he came up with one day could be discarded by the next morning: beauty comes from daring. Things that currently exist are defined anew, things that are found are treated and used like those that were custom-made. Many of his works are also temporary and exist now only as documentation.
His artistic universe is a large archive in the middle of which a spring of whimsical ideas continuously bubbles. Despite the artist’s ever-changing look, recognizable motif patterns remain, such as networks, connections, agglomerations, the separation of identities, chaos and order. His intention is to create and show relationships and associations, bringing them together into an encyclopedic spiderweb, arranged not only alphabetically but also as he pleases.
Jury meets on Saturday, March 3
March 3rd, 2018 was the big day: the jury met to select 15 to 20 participant artists from the almost 200 submissions to the Wunsiedler Water Games. The jury members were:
Zdenka Bilkova, Curator (Gallery Carlsbad – Ostrov)
Raimund Böhringer, Landscaping Architect (Wunsiedel Citizens’ Forum)
Stefan Frank, Film Producer (Wunsiedel Citizens’ Forum)
Dr. Robert Grötschel, Independent Curator, Art Historian
German Schlaug, Art Instructor (Wunsiedel Citizens’ Forum)
Eberhard Tröger, Lecturer, ZHdK & ZHAW
THE ARTISTS | Dana Widawski, Berlin
Dana Widawski, born in 1973, lives and works in Berlin. The artist studied Textile Design at the Burg Giebichenstein College for Art and Design in Halle/Saale from 1995-2000 and then afterwards studied Art in Context from 2004 to 2006 at the University of Arts in Berlin.
In 2011, Dana Widawski won the Art Award of the City of Schwabach, in 2001 a grant from the Wilhelm-Lorch-Stiftung, and in 2000 a grant from the HKD Burg Giebichenstein.
Dana Widawski paints tiles. Tiles like those found in every bathroom, tiles like those that were painted with colbalt blue in Delft hundreds of years ago, to remind one, with the world’s beauty, of the impermanent nature of earthly existence.
In her works, Dana Widawski calls to mind classic ornaments from different cultures and epochs. She extends and defamiliarizes these structures with contemporary illustrations and makes something look decorative at first glance. When one takes a closer look, however, one perceives a confusing and ironic layer under the surface, one that addresses societal clichés and paradoxes and calls them into question.
THE ARTISTS | Korbinian Huber, Duggendorf
Born in Freising in 1965, Korbinian Huber completed training in stone carving before studying Sculpting at the Academy of Visual Arts in Nürnberg from 1990 to 1996. In 1993 he won Freising County’s Art Advancement Award. He is involved in various art symposiums both in Germany and abroad. Korbinian Huber lives and works as an independent artist in Duggendorf.
Korbinian Hubers wooden sculptures are created four-dimensionally. Through his work, the sculptor breaks from the idea of wooden stiffness and creates his own imagination-powered, poetic world. With a smile and irony from a distance, Huber is able to capture the fullness of life through his work. His unconventional, sometimes delicate, sometimes crude, sculptures give testimony to a passionate, very innovative and ever-professional connection to wood.
For Wunsiedel, Huber created an installation which offers a “good, deep look” into the Wunsiedel Ice Pond. The surface of standing water or of the sea is a geometric plane, a fundamental concept of two-dimensionality. Questioning this otherwise unquestioning surface, the standard for all constructive intentions, is a game Korbinian Huber cannot resist playing.
THE ARTISTS | Michael Mordo
Michael Mordo, born in Stuttgart in 1961, is both a graphic and visual artist and musician. He began his artistic studies studying Puppet Building with the puppetry artist Albrecht Roser. From 1982 to 1988 he studied Sculpturing at the State Academy for Visual and Graphic Arts in Stuttgart, while continuing to teach himself jazz, which he started learning when he was still very young.
He teaches Puppet Construction and Artistic Design as Lecturer on the subject of Puppet Theater at the College of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart. He has been exhibiting his works (paintings, scuptures, puppets) since 1985.
Since 2014, Michael Mordo has been working with Ruth Küblers “droplet picture” technique. This method makes internal structures of water droplets visible. Over many years, the artist has modified this method to fit his needs, and, to this end, has even constructed special microscopes and other equipment.
Every nuance contained within water comes to light through Mordo’s enormous talent for reacting sensitively in different ways. Water in a “droplet picture” is no longer recognizable as such, but rather as the dry residue created at the moment of droplet formation and during the dynamics of evaporation.
The focus is on the capturing the asthetic value of the pictures, their visual and picturesque richness. For the Wunsiedel Water Games, the artist aims to make structures within Wunsiedel’s own native waters visible with this tecnnique.