Artist Statement

I grew up on the east coast of Schleswig-Holstein, in a landscape characterized by vastness, wind, and ever-changing colors. As a teenager, I often stood alone on the cliffs where the earth breaks and the sea begins. The vibrant rapeseed fields, the green meadows, the brown plowed fields, the wildflower meadows, and the stones on the beach—all these forms, textures, and layers of color are deeply imprinted on my memory. The rugged earth of the cliffs, its fractures and transitions, became early teachers of my perception. These landscapes remain an inner archive, a resonating chamber from which I draw inspiration.

Today, when I visit cities or hike through landscapes, structures speak to me almost physically. Urban morphologies, weathered surfaces, cracks, faults, morbid fragments—they enter my visual memory, my ever-expanding "go-to memory." I don't consciously collect these impressions; They gather themselves. And in the painting process, they re-emerge, sometimes clearly, sometimes only as an echo, as a mood, as a rhythm.

My artistic work moves within the tension between abstract art and photography. I use both media to explore states in which order and chaos merge. I am fascinated by the moment when structures begin to tip—when order drifts into chaos, or when chaos suddenly reveals an inner logic. This tension has accompanied me since childhood: the coastal landscapes, the fields, the stones, the eroding edges of the cliffs—they all carry this ambivalence within them.

I work with a variety of materials and painting media, combining them with collage elements and the combine technique. Paper, paint, found objects, fragments—each material brings its own story, its own energy. In their interplay, something emerges that is greater than the sum of its parts. I layer, tear, join, paint over, destroy, and rebuild. Collage becomes a tool of thought for me: it allows me to deconstruct and reassemble reality, to shift meanings, to cast the familiar in a new light.

My fascination with Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg shaped me early on. Their freedom in working with fragments, found objects, and fractures showed me that art can be a place where all material is allowed to carry meaning. But what I seek is not imitation, but resonance. I try to translate the energy that their works evoked in me into my own language. My work is an attempt to experience this fascination anew—not as a copy, but as a personal extension of it.

Thus, my works create a network of ordered chaos and chaotic order. An image can begin with a clear structure and, in the process, tip into the unpredictable. Or it grows out of a random fragment and suddenly finds an inner logic. I trust that my inner archive—the coastlines, the fields, the stones, the urban structures—guides me without my conscious control.

My art is a dialogue between memory and the present, between material and feeling, between control and surrender. It is an attempt to show the world as I perceive it: as a web of layers, traces, and fractures, in which beauty often arises where something begins to erode. For me, art is a continuous process of wonder—a way to touch the invisible and to find my own fragile order within chaos.

Jörg Vollstedt