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Lea Asja Pagenkemper

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In her recent works, Lea Asja Pagenkemper (1976, Berlin) has frequently explored the emptiness of the picture’s surface; of landscape elements that seem to lose themselves in a poetic space. Despite the emptiness, Pagenkemper’s works always relate to ‘setting boundaries’ and ‘the other person’s territory’, taking possession of a dark street corner that Pagenkemper zooms in on in her paintings, or the meadow landscape that seems to be withdrawn from the viewer. The word ‘graffiti’ often comes up in descriptions of her work. Graffiti has everything to do with marking out territory, but Pagenkemper’s work is characterised by a boundless freedom in terms of media and the means by which she endows her work with significance. In her latest works, Pagenkemper draws her inspiration from musical lyrics. She attempts to give add an acoustic dimension to the image, for example by means of direct reference to the lyrics of a song. How Pagenkemper manages to find the right field of tension between word and image only becomes clear in the actual execution of the work. Sometimes the inspiration comes from an image as it emerges; sometimes it comes from the lyrics of a song, or a certain literary sentence that rises from the depths of memory and demands an appropriate visual image. Words and images reinforce each other and all contribute to her complex paintings.

Lea Asja Pagenkemper studied under the tutelage of Georg Baselitz at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. After graduating in 2004, she continued studying under Baselitz to attain a Master’s Degree in 2005. Lea Asja Pagenkemper has exhibited her work at (among others) Galerie Jette Rudolph in Berlin (2005, 2007), Museum Elgiz in Istanbul (2005) and Fondation La Maison Rouge in Paris (2004)  (Sammlung Falckenberg). In 2008 she took part in ‘Cobra to Contemporary, The collection of Hugo and Carla Brown’, presented by Artnews Projects in Berlin. In 2011 her work will be on display at Art Los Angeles Contemporary in the United States, and in  25 + 25 at Kunstverein Ettlingen Wilhelmshöne in Germany.