BERLIN.- It’s that time of the year again when Luisa Catucci Gallery traditionally hosts its women’s group show, with feminine energies aligning with the strength and vitality of summer.

This year, the gallery presents ROOTS, featuring seven exciting, positive, and dynamic artists: Yvonne Andreini, Michelle Blancke, Aniana Heras, Parsa Hosseinpour, Hyon-Soo Kim, Anabelle Mandeng, and Loreal Prystaj.

In their works, ROOTS emerge as both literal and symbolic forces—markers of origin, vessels of memory, and systems through which life, culture, and selfhood persist and evolve. These seven artists explore roots not only as lineage—ancestral, cultural, and emotional—but also as systems of growth, erosion, interconnection, and transformation. Together, they form a rich ecosystem of rootedness that spans the personal, social, ecological, and metaphysical. The exhibition ROOTS acts as a concept that anchors and connects, stretching across time, place, and identity.

Italian by origin and based in Berlin, Yvonne Andreini‘s abstract works form a visual dialogue between chaotic organic forms and perceived architectural structures. She won the DAAD prize in 2008, and she’s the founder of the artist residency program INSULA in Ventotene, Italy, aiming to promote exchanges between European artists within a geopolitical European context. Drawing on the Futurist movement and classical themes such as nature morte and landscape painting, her paintings explore the thresholds between order and impulse, interiority and exteriority – reflecting the dynamic nature of psychological and social boundaries. Her work focuses on energy itself: an invisible field inherent in all things, a spiritual force that both transcends material form and displays the unpredictability of human emotion.

A lens-based artist in Amsterdam, Michelle Blancke graduated from the Fotoacademie in 2023 and earned the 2025 BBA Photography Award in Berlin. She translates her solitary nature walks into saturated, almost surreal images. Her photographs are atmospheric portals – steeped in mood and memory – where nature becomes both sanctuary and psychological metaphor, connecting the external wilderness to the internal one. She captures natural spaces through a digital lens, and she later edits to reveal their metaphysical, almost alchemical qualities. Her work draws connections to the Romantic Sublime and Symbolism through its mood, memory, and mystical qualities, while also resonating with Surrealism, which critics highlight through her skill in blurring reality and fantasy, transforming ordinary natural scenes into deeply emotional and dreamlike experiences that invite reflection on the relationship between nature and the self.

Spanish artist based in Berlin, Aniana Heras, turned to ceramics only in recent years, atter a lifetime working in corporate business. An urgent call from her soul roots led her to leave behind her career in communication design and fully dedicate herself to ceramic art achieving an impressive level of mastery in a remarkably short time. Heras rooted her work in the form of a traditional Spanish vase, historically linked to the sacred feminine, which she deconstructs and reimagines into sculptural vessels that resist function. These often sealed or inaccessible forms speak to ideas of containment and transformation, connecting ancestral memory with personal ritual. In Heras’s work, roots take shape through clay-emerging as vessels of identity, healing, and inner truth.

Iranian artist Parsa Hosseinpour‘s work delves into themes of introspection, isolation, and connection, profoundly shaped by personal milestones such as her transformative experiences during her recent travels across Europe. Invited to process this through art, she centres her practice on the solitary female figure, not as a self-portrait, but as an emotional vessel embodying universal states of being. Her recent works explore the dialogue between the internal and the intimate terrain of emotion and the broader natural and cultural environments we inhabit. In this interplay, rootedness emerges not through literal ground but through memory, displacement, and emotional resonance. By channelling personal uncertainty into visual form, Hosseinpour’s art becomes a quiet yet potent act of grounding, a search for presence and meaning amid fragmentation. Her figures embody the resilience of uprootedness, holding space for vulnerability while tracing invisible lines of belonging.

Hyon Soo Kim, originally from Rural South Korea, grew up in a traditional Confucian family and trained as a goldsmith in Seoul before moving to Germany in the early 1980s. Influenced by the writings of Kafka and Nietzche, her journey was marked by personal loss and philosophical inquiry. Her work combines traditional craftsmanship with an emotional, intellectual depth, reflecting her lifelong exploration of identity, memory, and cultural dislocation. Kim’s projects “M.A.R.I.A” and “Der Weg der Schöpfung” explore the concept of roots through familial bonds and themes of growth and erosion. The installation M. A. R. I.A consists of motherly figures. These adult and child figures are wrapped in the brightly coloured strips of material which are used in the sewing of festive and evocative garments in Korea. The installation “Der Weg der Schöpfung” explores the essence of fragmented and overlooked identity. Such things take an important position in her work as she often combines found/natural materials into her work, things that could be otherwise perceived as negligible.

Anabelle Mandeng is a German artist with Cameroonian heritage whose works focus on her identity as a biracial German. Her art acts as a mirror of her own experiences as a black woman in a mostly White society. With a need to express herself, art is not her only medium, as she also works as an actress and presenter. Most of her muses in her portraits are her friends who are equally German with black roots, and this is complemented by her podcast “Aktivkohle” which amplifies the Black German experience. Her use of birds and natural imagery like flowers and leaves, connotes freedom and the vibrancy that comes with that. Her tape work “coexistence” symbolises the coexistence of different genders, ethnicities and opinions within our society as a form of cultural and political resistance, particularly in response to the resurgence of right-wing populism and conservatism in contemporary Germany. Mandeng’s art insists on visibility-asserting Black presence while evoking transformation, belonging, and resilience, just as her life motto also asserts: “giving up is not an option”.

Loreal Prystaj is an American visual artist based in London and New York. Graduated from Royal College of Arts, her work centres on the phenomenology of consciousness, lived experience, and the surreal. She disrupts the “conventional” environment to reveal its psychological impact on the individual or the collective. Using photography, moving images, sculpture, and installation, she creates stagings that highlight the relationship between surroundings and their effect on the subconscious through narrative and symbolism. Her work Playing House, included in the exhibition Roots, is a playful yet incisive critique of the traditionally expected role of women within the domestic space-particularly in conservative, rural areas of Europe and America, where outdated gender norms often persist. Through staged imagery and symbolic gestures, the piece challenges viewers to reconsider notions of femininity, identity, and societal expectation, ultimately questioning the very roots of patriarchal preconceptions about the female role.