FRANKFURT.- Myriam Holme, born in 1971 in Mannheim, studied in Karlsruhe under Prof. Meuser and Prof. Andreas Slominski and has since then presented her work in exhibitions in Germany and abroad. She has held several guest professorships at art universities, most recently at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Myriam Holme’s paintings arise from an exploration of the paint and the material of the substrate used. For her paintings she generally employs sheet aluminum destined for printing, which is treated with various stains and lacquers. She tests the different possibilities that various materials and tools offer painting. At the same time Holme’s paintings go beyond the surface and conquer the space. As such she moves between the traditional genres of painting, sculpture and installation and uses them as equivalent forms of expression. Her artistic interest centers on the differing textures of the materials she works with, and above all the specific, purely optical phenomena they are able to give rise to. Complex processes such as absorption, layering, repelling, seeping, and chemical reactions of painting materials shape her pictures. The time factor thus plays a significant role in these works – they are briefly frozen moments, torn from a complex work process.

For the artist the material is a partner in dialog, who invites her to conduct alchemistic experiments, as it were. Although Myriam Holme’s “pictures” freeze the work process, they enmesh the observer in a disentanglement puzzle by extending into the space. The borders of these “pictures” are not fixed, and their pictorial quality results only from interplay with the observer. 

The first exhibition “auf bewusstseinsschollen” (on floes of consciousness) focuses on large-scale works on paper. The artist has rediscovered the classic material paper and transformed it completely in her works. These are large-scale images that mostly appear to be divested of the materiality of paper. Only the odd spot in these pieces makes direct reference to the material paper, indeed generally it seems as though in pictorial terms it has transformed into different aggregate states: It sometimes appears to be fabric, but can also convey the character of heavy concrete or be reminiscent of metal. A dialog between painting and sculpture takes place in the interplay of the materials Holme uses, paper and aluminum, one in which their respective boundaries are questioned. Here the aluminum can look like paper, and the paper take on a metallic appearance. The space offered by the real surfaces on which they unfold is never really sufficient for Holme’s compositions. Her images do not only expand into the space, but play with the boundary between illusion and reality.