ARTIST INTERVIEW WITH NADINE LOHOF

Your work often explores themes such as mimesis, excess, and social codes. What draws you to these concepts, and how do they manifest in your art?

I am interested in different roles that human beings perform. I am a painter, a friend, a daughter, a partner, a mother, a cousin, a child – all of these coexist within me. Life is a stage – a tragic theater with moments of wonderful joy and horrible suffering. And we all share being trapped in these digesting bodies that we can‘t get rid off – we are trying to hide all these bodily matters and apparently leave our traces all over the place. 

Humans, their relationships and our animalistic nature is what draws my interest – what do we hide from others ? What kind of dark thoughts do we keep to ourselves ?

Your creative process has been described as a form of digestion, incorporating elements from art history and daily life. Could you elaborate on how these influences converge in your work?

The painterly process seems like a digestive process for me, I also once said it’s like cooking a ragout without a recipe. 

I can choose my ingredients, the colours, the brushes, the structure and size of the canvas and then I start – maybe with the idea of a face or a certain painting that interests me in the composition or the depiction of the figures or maybe through a single gesture in it – then, in the painting process, the cooking, the stirring – the chosen materials compose a new work and merge with ideas that enfold themselves quite naturally.

Having studied both Philosophy & Gender Studies and Fine Arts, how do these disciplines intersect in your artistic practice? Your painted stages often suggest psychosocial constellations. Is that a centrefold to your approach?

One could think so – I probably have more questions than answers also regarding my own work. I think I actually would stop working if I would be too sure of what I am doing – that does not mean at all that this is all randomly chosen, I wouldn’t paint figures if I would not be interested in relationships. 

And these characters are definitely genderfluid.

The time you spend on a painting varies significantly. What factors determine the pace at which you complete a work?

Factor A is for sure having two kids now. So sometimes there are more interruptions than I would wish. 

At the same time it allows some works to sit around longer and when returning to the studio they sometimes seem finished because I had more distance to them. I would say though I am a quick painter in general I am very impatient.

You’ve incorporated soap as a medium for your sculptures, highlighting its haptic qualities and associations with cleansing. What led you to choose this unconventional material, and what does it symbolize in your work?

I guess thinking about traces led me to soap – washing our hands, our body, making it clean again. Getting rid of dirt and grease, perfuming it. 

I put soaps between my clothes, the scent sticks to them, it reminds me of childhood, of memories that are too far away to find words for. It seems somehow a very nostalgic material.

Born in Kassel and now based in Berlin, how have these environments influenced your artistic perspective and subject matter?

I was raised in Kaufungen, next to a forest and a stream growing up in a house with my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, my other grandparents living in the house opposite. There was no anonymity – I escaped as soon as I could to Berlin, but just because I found love there. I felt home right from the start probably because of the relationship rather than the city. I honestly nowadays don’t really know how much living in Berlin influences my work, I love having a good meal and that’s obviously possible in Berlin otherwise I am just working in my studio or hanging out with my kids and partner in parks. I would say I have a love / hate relationship with the city, Berlin can be so ugly and uninviting and at the same time vast and laid-back.

Your work blends stories of rural life with fantastical elements, mixing opulence with the grounded. How do you balance these contrasts to create a cohesive narrative?

I have the feeling these contrasts also live within me – I come from a family of craftspeople, being an artist seems sometimes quite opulent for me yet it is a craft but very different to plumbing. I think I am very much attracted to inconsistencies, they are everywhere and within us all.

Through a rich blend of historical motifs and styles, you craft a contemporary painterly approach marked by depth and intensity. How do you select and integrate these historical references into your work?

This comes naturally through the love of painting for me – there is nothing in this world that touches me more than a good painting. There are elements that keep coming back in my work that I probably saw in other paintings. In Picasso`s Famille de bateleurs you can see a ladder, so beautifully painted, so fragile. The ladder, the onions, the flute, they stick with me. They are hugely symbolic and at the same time very personal.