I was born in 1976 in Frankfurt (Oder), a town in eastern Brandenburg, and raised in Berlin. I grew up in the old DDR and was 13 when the Wall came down. Life changed suddenly over night, for all of us in different ways. New paths opened and others were closed. There were dreams of sharing the affluence and opportunities of the West. I left Germany and moved to the UK to study English Literature & Art History at Ruskin College and Brookes University in Oxford.
The landscapes of Brandenburg and Berlin are the subject matters that inspire me most. I try and depict the spirit of the places that I call home. As a maker of art, my paintings and poems are the sound of my voice. It is simply how I see the world and life at any given moment in time. It is - for me - a unique way of being able to pin down that one moment, to say: that’s one way of seeing.
But it is also much more. It is tying it all together, influences, pieces of knowledge, fragments, experiences from the past and present that cluster and feed into my imagination, that I distill, and I recycle, layer and extract. There are the old masters (Max Liebermann, Julie Wolfthorn, William Turner) that I study and am inspired by.
Mixed with the moods of the moment, the process of creating goes on and on until all of the different influences and reflections make up an inner melody.