SUSANNE KESSLER

The German – Italian painter, illustrator and installation artist Susanne Kessler lives in Berlin/Germany and Rome/Italy. From 1975–1982 she studied painting and graphic at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. In 1992 she won the Paul Strecker Award of the City of Mainz.

In addition to scholarships and artist residencies more than 50 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions have taken her throughout Europe and to India, Pakistan, Mali Ethiopia, Guatemala, Iran, Latvia and the USA (Turlock, CA, Washington, DC, New York, NY, Charlottesville, VA). 2001/2002 she has served as a guest professor at the California State University – Stanislaus, USA, followed to the Latvian Academy of Arts in Riga, Latvia in 2010 and to the City University of New York, NY, USA from 2010 till 2013.

Susanne Kessler creates expansive, organic-like installations. Primarily based on drawing, she has been concentrating on natural, living structures for many years. Some of her work is dedicated to imagery of the internal organs like the human brain, with its visual appearance and its inner complex structure. According to Kessler, only the limitation to the brain, with individual thinking and visualizing, promotes an “ego-construction”, which moves away from science and into an artistic world.

Thought fragments and trains of thoughts that deal continually with biological models are often integrated by Kessler into a system of drawings, forming a complex net of overlapping patterns and poetic content. In the center of her work the Wheel of Life, the principle of life, is made visible as a flow of vital energy, as an ever-changing process reflecting at the same time the work process of the artist. Series of drawings are constantly involved in new installations in order to renew from within. This results include spaces of graphic signs and symbols, integrating some of the kinetic energy of the location. These biological models have revealed themselves, for example, in organic forms cut out of Tyvek paper.