‘Für mich – for me – Formidable’ | A solo exhibition by Nadine Lohof
Circle Culture Gallery, Hamburg
Opening: Saturday, April 12, 2025
Life unfolds as a stage—an intricate theater of mimesis, excess, and coded interactions. In this ever-shifting spectacle, the artist navigates roles as fluid as the paint on their canvas: painter, parent, partner, child, performer. These identities coexist, blending in a ceaseless act of becoming, where relationships oscillate between tenderness and tension, intimacy and concealment.
The exhibition title, Für mich – for me – Formidable, echoes the melancholic grandeur of Charles Aznavour’s iconic song For Me Formidable, in which love, longing, and identity shift between languages and emotions. Just as Aznavour’s lyrics oscillate between French and English, playing with duality and self-reflection, Lohof’s paintings explore the fluidity of identity, relationships, and the tension between visibility and concealment.
At the heart of this artistic practice lies an obsession with the visceral and the ephemeral—the human body as both a site of transformation and entrapment. We strive to master our own corporeality, to mask the grotesque, to suppress the animalistic. And yet, we leave traces—residues of touch, scent, presence. The paintings, much like human interaction itself, bear witness to what is hidden and what inevitably surfaces.
The process itself mirrors digestion, a slow breakdown of influences that range from art historical icons to everyday observations. Much like cooking without a recipe, the act of painting is a ritual of instinct and improvisation. The composition may begin with a face, a fleeting gesture, or the memory of a familiar motif—an onion, a ladder, a flute—each carrying the weight of its symbolic lineage, from Picasso’s harlequins to the fragmented bodies of Baselitz. But as layers accumulate, the original reference dissolves, giving birth to something entirely new, charged with contemporary urgency.
Steeped in the psychosocial, the artist’s work engages with gender fluidity and human relationships, but not as fixed constructs—instead, they exist in a state of questioning, of perpetual revision. There is no clear resolution, no static identity; rather, a fascination with inconsistencies and contradictions, a refusal to pin down what remains in flux.
Materiality plays a crucial role in these explorations. The use of soap in sculpture, for instance, speaks to the paradox of cleansing: the desire to erase, to purify, yet leaving behind an imprint, a lingering scent, an emotional residue. Soap is deeply nostalgic, a trigger for memory, its texture and scent imbued with personal and collective histories.
This oscillation between past and present, rural and urban, opulence and the everyday, is a constant balancing act. Raised in a tight-knit, craft-oriented household in Kaufungen, the artist now works in Berlin—a city that embodies both rawness and openness. This duality finds expression in the paintings, where grand gestures meet intimate details, and where the echo of historical grandeur collides with contemporary irreverence.
Ultimately, these works resist categorization. They do not seek to illustrate a theory but to engage in an ongoing dialogue—between the old and the new, the known and the unspoken, the performed and the deeply felt. They invite us to step onto the stage, to observe, to question, and perhaps to recognize ourselves in the painted figures and their quiet, unresolved dramas.
