Natascha Schmitten Fluctuo

The painter Natascha Schmitten created the large-scale mural »Fluctuo« in the ›Eifelraum‹. Over several days, the artist engaged with the local conditions, the space, and the changing light, responding with her painting in a situational, open-ended creative process.

The work spans 335 cm in height and 600 cm in width. Natascha Schmitten, known for creating light-filled picture spaces and capturing them on frames covered with nylon fabric, chose the wall as her painting surface here. Conventional relationships between the picture surface and the edge of the picture are renegotiated, with wall color, or ›wall white‹, incorporated as an additional component, and familiar processes in the painting act are newly choreographed.

Delicate, sweeping areas of ink are bounded by sharp silhouettes and a statically appearing surface, or they merge, flowing together with vibrating shades of blue and orange. The complementary contrast of blue and orange appears in many nuances across the entire surface of the mural, suggesting various surface qualities.
Foreground and background continuously shift into a new relationship with each other through deliberate placement and omission, giving the work a fluid, dynamic character. Individual fragments of body and volume can be discerned in the work that flows across the wall like waves. Natascha Schmitten is not interested in pure abstraction; her painting emerges in the simultaneity of abstraction and figuration.

Snapshots from the artist’s (both art-historical and personal) visual memory are the subject of her works and are here also mediated in the ephemerality of »Fluctuo«, which is created to last only for the duration of a fleeting moment. While the work endures only in memory, the creation process has been documented in a film, resulting in a sensitive portrait that provides insight into the artist’s working method.