Trust. Works from the class of Tomma Abts

Opening: Friday June 23, 2017, 7pm

The Londoner-by-choice Tomma Abts, famous for her precisely painted compositions, invited her entire Düsseldorf class to participate in Trust. Nineteen young painters have been working for months on compositions, specially devised for this exhibition. They operate here in diverse media: painting, performance, sculpture and photography.

Trust, the title the students themselves chose for the exhibition, primarily stands for self-trust (fiducia) as in the trust one has in oneself, while the term is also associated with friendship, fidelity and trust in others. The academy class’s exhibition displays the free handling of a common theme while simultaneously integrating individual artistic positions with different work processes.

Tomma Abts has taught at the Düsseldorfer Kunstakadmie (Düsseldorf Academy of the Arts) for seven years. Her goal is to encourage the students to feel out artistic boundaries to downright defy them, create “extended forms of art” (“Erweiterte Kunstformen”) and be able to realize individual intention and intuition. The exhibition addresses the young student’s daily struggles surrounding artistic processes, the interrogation of inherited art forms and their own self-conception.

Featuring Julia Adelgren, Alexander Basil, Tobias Berve, Liora Epstein, Daphne Fietz, Nico Flies, Michel Gomm, Isabelle Heske, Vera Keckstein, Ryo Kinoshita, Marlene Kollender, Filiz Özcelik, Jannis Schroeder, Maya Shirakawa, Thea Stahmer, Mikkel Pedersen, Niels Plata, Min-Hae Sohn, and Tadashi Toyama.