WELTEN WANDLERIN N°1
Ellen Akimoto – Matter Ecstatic
curated by Stephan Klee

Ellen Akimoto’s (*1988 Westlake Village, US) paintings often centre on individual people in their personal interiors. The private living space in its architecture and atmosphere, with its furnishings and pets, not only offers a place of retreat and shelter but also reflects the inner life of the occupants and their often tense relationship to the world. As the room layout, daytime mood, incidence of light, colour scheme and fragmented details sometimes seem unfamiliar and alienating, the sense of security within one’s own four walls is put to the test.
Where does this unique, subterranean mysteriousness in Akimoto’s works come from? Is it due to the artist’s dialogue between real paintings and computer-based images? Drawing from both sources, she assembles her painterly collages from digital set pieces of various bodies and fragments of several spatial views on the canvas. In this way, almost floating, modular actors, like mannequins, wander through fragmented spaces.
In these dreamy de-arrangements, Akimoto does not create authentic studies of people but rather generates images of people in a more general sense, which nevertheless sometimes carry the faces of real people in front of them like a mask. Her pictures fundamentally show the sensitivity and flexibility of the human being, as a being that absorbs the most diverse influences and reacts in unexpected ways.

Akimoto earned her BFA from the California State University Chico, during which she spent a year studying at the Mainz Academy of Arts in Germany. She went on to complete a post-graduate Meisterschüler degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig, funded by a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD. She has received grants from the Cultural Foundation of Saxony and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and her work has been acquired by the Dresden Public Art Collection. From 2021 to 2022 she was a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She has exhibited widely in Germany and has had solo shows in Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Saint Rémy de Provence in France.

Programme

• Sun 14.01.24, 11:30 am – 3:00 pm: Vernissage & Reception
• Fri 02.02.24, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm: Guided tour with artist, Dr Sors & curator plus panel discussion & edition
  
• Sun 04.02.24, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Sunday guided tour
• Sun 25.02.24, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm: Finissage with guided tour & edition

Please book your participation in the events at info@kunstvereingoettingen.de or klee@kunstvereingoettigen.de respectively by telephone at 0551-44899

 

Edition of Ellen Akimoto

The Kunstverein Göttingen has created an exquisite edition for all friends of Ellen Akimoto’s current works:
Ellen Akimoto Picture Holder Again, 2024, 42 x 29.7 cm, age-resistant digital FINE ART – pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Matt Baryta paper, 308g/m², edition of 15 / 3 AP,
Price: 320 € / 240 € for members of the KV Göttingen
As a thank you for an important donation to the programme, you are not only bringing a wonderful work into your private space, but you are also supporting the work of the Kunstverein Göttingen for contemporary young art and the artists involved.
> If you are interested, please contact us here: info@kunstvereingoettingen.de

 

 

The Annual Programme 2024

TERRA DIASPORA – WELTEN WANDELN – ( CHANGING WORLDS )
TERRA DIASPORA is the leitmotif of the Kunstverein Göttingen 2024-2025. In the face of fundamental upheavals in the coexistence of nature and mankind, TERRA DIASPORA stands for a world on the move; for a terrain that is becoming increasingly alien to its inhabitants and for an earth on which people are becoming foreign bodies. It is an earth in a foreign land, a terra diaspora.

The first part of the 2024 programme series is called TERRA DIASPORA – WELTEN WANDELN (CHANGING WORLDS) and shows artists, who create new worlds between rational reality, dream and fantasy. Doubting a purely functional reality and often characterised by experiences of family migration, the exhibited artists combine the familiar with the new, fuse facts with the fantastic and create their own identity from old stories and new experiences. Worlds become visible that lie in our roots and emerge as we walk across this earth.
The 2024-2025 annual programme was developed by curator Stephan Klee and will be overseen by him over the next two years. The artist Ellen Akimoto will kick off the 2024 annual programme with her solo paintings in the liminal spaces between reality, vision and virtuality.

We would like to thank our sponsors: Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and the Arts, City of Göttingen, Landschaftsverband Südniedersachsen e.V. and Sparkasse Göttingen.