My practice is grounded in the European tradition of painting, oil, tempera, the patient discipline of layering and glazing, yet it unfolds within a contemporary field where material, fragility, and transformation outweigh form and color.
Porcelain, textiles, and pigments become metaphors of impermanence, delicate vessels of memory and force. Each work arises as a theatre of matter. It is not an act of research but of command: art does not inquire, it declares.
My paintings are not illusions but presences, marked by scar, by trace, by the gravity of substance itself. Here, fragility is not a sign of weakness but of presence, a tensile force binding beauty to its own dissolution.
The process remains fluid, never fixed, always carving new channels and thoughts. It is a search, not a study, for art governs rather than justifies. What endures is the imprint of time upon matter, the quiet pursuit of the Wesen der Dinge, the essence of things.
In this series, human presence appears as a fleeting trace, neither fully here nor gone. Figures emerge from a haze of light and dissolve into it again, caught between appearance and disappearance. The blurred silhouettes evoke the rhythm of cities, yet the atmosphere feels suspended, as if time itself had slowed down.
These works are not portraits but moments of existence, fragments of movement, solitude, and reflection. The surface breathes with layered oil, where each brushstroke holds both substance and dissolution. Light does not merely illuminate; it erases and remembers.
Here, fragility becomes form. What remains is not the body, but the trace, the quiet echo of being among others.
Oil on Canvas, 205x160 cm
Oil on Canvas, 205x150 cm
Oil on Canvas, 205x150 cm
Oil on Canvas, 210x160 cm
These works revolve around the tension between body and consciousness, between control and the loss of it. The figures are naked, vulnerable, exposed to the point of the grotesque. Their gestures oscillate between comedy and agony, the moment when emotion becomes a mask and the inner self forces its way to the surface.
The bodies speak where language fails. Skin becomes a stage, muscle becomes memory, pain becomes an echo of civilization. In the repetition of the pose, in the trembling of the brush, a psychological portrait of the modern human being emerges, trapped in the loop of their own affects, in the absurd self-staging of a fragile existence.
In my painting, I examine how emotion translates into matter. How color, flesh, and gesture merge until the body itself becomes a vessel of inner states. I am drawn to the moment when the figurative begins to collapse, when realism is no longer representation but a psychic imprint. The brush does not hold, it dissolves. Skin turns into surface, surface into tension. Within this controlled loss of control, truth appears, not beautiful, not final, but flickering, vulnerable, human.
Oil on Canvas, 105x105 cm
Oil on Canvas, 205x150 cm
I paint people caught in moments of in-between, between action and stillness, intimacy and estrangement. I am drawn to the unspectacular, to the quiet drama of everyday life. There is a certain truth that only appears when nothing seems to happen: a gesture, a glance, a certain fatigue.
My figures are never heroes. They exist in suspension, observed, photographed, exhausted, absent. I capture that instant when the human becomes visible precisely because it is overlooked.
Painting, for me, is not representation but reverberation. I shift reality slightly until it reveals its hidden structure. Sometimes this happens in small signs, a shadow that doesn't align, an animal that appears unexpectedly and tilts the scene toward another kind of reality.
I see the present as a psychological space. The surface of the everyday becomes a site of projection of power, vanity, tenderness, and indifference.
Oil on Canvas, 160x160 cm
Oil on Canvas, 220x160 cm
Oil on Canvas, 150x120 cm
Oil on Canvas, 160x160 cm
My koi are not about fish, but rhythm, the quiet tension between movement and stillness. Harmony, for me, is never static. It breathes, shifts, and finds balance even in chaos. One painting moves; the other rests. Both belong to the same pulse, where motion becomes form, and beauty holds its breath.
Oil on Canvas, 220x160 cm
Oil on Canvas, 120x80 cm
Porcelain
Made of hand-dyed wool, 140x170 cm
for exhibitions, collaborations, or questions about my work, please get in touch.
Verantwortlich gemäß § 5 TMG und § 55 Abs. 2 RStV
Izabella Wickenburg
Immanuelkirchstr. 26
10405 Berlin
Deutschland
E-Mail: info@polyatelier.com
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