FRANKFURT.- Myriam Holme, born 1971, studied at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe with Prof. Meuser and Prof. Andreas Slominski. In 2009 she was visiting professor at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe and from 2012 till 2013 at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. Myriam Holme is co-initiator and curator of the project Einraumhaus.

"etwas, das leises gewohnt ist" ("something that is used to the quiet")

Myriam Holme's painting establishes a morphology of revealing and concealing: By juxtaposing and joining together polarities in the exhibition "etwas, das leises gewohnt ist" ("something that is used to the quiet"), the artist investigates the interaction of space and surface, which she simultaneously unites in the sculptural image. In her current show, Holme expands the picture space of her works by including the three-dimensionality of her earlier spatial installations in a picture medium. The artist uses aluminium plates that beforehand served as offset printing plates for advertising posters and thus reveal specific traces of use such as a rainbow-like colour gradient at the edge of the plates and slight indentations. Myriam Holme adds linear foldings to them, expanding the plane picture medium to a body protruding into space.

In an alchemistic-experimental painting process with paint and chemicals, Holme probes the interaction of substances that attract and repel each other on the surface of the picture medium. The uniting of substances such as etchant, varnish and gold leaf, as well as the superimposing and layering of acrylic, pencil and chalk - as in the picture "imzwischensonst" - create a spatial picture composition which is controlled by Holme, but also determined by the inherent dynamism of the substances reacting among each other. Agglomeration and dispersion of colour pigments and the creation of crystalline structures stand in both a contrasting and supplementary relation to Holmes earlier painting on poplar: The artist transfers the process of absorbing paint in the wood fibre to paper in her new works, applying it to the aluminium picture medium in a collage technique.

The various formats of the plates demand different ways of working with them, with the artist's own body dimensions being decisive for the creation of the pictures. A concrete reference to the body is particularly visible in the work "entimmernd": The two-by-three-metre picture object not only exteriorises to the viewer the influence and effect of force but also refers to the related fragility that Holme makes visible through the break in the surface of the massive material in the form of a flanking touch. Large, turquoise-transparent, broken glass stones that take up painterly structures from the picture and haptically prolong them into the exhibition space make the work vacillate between lightness and heaviness. Here, the artist visualises not only the possibility of transforming structures but also the fragile and unforeseeable moment of change: a break that is mirrored in her pictures as an ephemeral, yet fixed imprint.

The process of viewing, which alternates between being active and passive due to the changes of light and its reflection on the surface - and also due to the movements of the viewer -, ultimately covers Myriam Holme's painting like a varnish. The attribution of materiality dissolves and oscillates between materiality itself and the image of it. Holme's pictures are thus both projection screens and levels of reflection that through the incidence of light continue independently in space. The opaque outlines and condensations of paint, on the other hand, are reminiscent of a past moment that the artist transfers from the situation and captures in her pictures. The titles of her works - and language as such - form a substance that Myriam Holme covers her pictures with as a final, immaterial layer. In doing so, the artist draws from a collection of poems she compiled herself, from which she condenses fragments to form a poetic agglomeration of words that she then attributes to the respective picture, leaving it behind as a metaphor rich in meaning, in correspondence to her painting.

In February / March 2015, Bernhard Knaus will hold the first solo show with Myriam Holme in the gallery. Large scale works on paper, where new pictorial occurences developed, will be shown for the first time.