Sonja Alhaeuser

Existential basic considerations are the focus of Sonja Alhaeuser’s work. It reveals the drama of life in all its abundance, manifested in lush sensu­alities and collective festivities all the way to a somber metabolism. In addition to her beautiful large-format, subtly colorized drawings, which can also be read as instructions for action or as recipes, the Berlin-based artist has become known to a wider public for her "Schokoladenmaschinen" (chocolate ­machines) and margarine sculptures in refrigerated display cases. For her feasts or "6 Bankette ohne Anlass" (6 banquets without cause), she invited ­diners to a near orgiastic obliteration of her installations, each one dedicated to a specific theme. The exuberant, sensually titillating arrangement of the panel installations with sculptures, hand-painted bunting, crustaceans such as lobsters and crayfish, excellent fish, or large cuts of venison is intended to not only help spur on culinary enjoyment, but also represents the general contradiction between our constant pursuit of pleasure deter­mining our lives just as much as our continuous desire for self-optimization.

Annett Reckert is a German art historian and curator; since 2010 she was director of Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst, where she realized more than 50 exhibitions on contemporary art. In March 2021 she will be at the renowned Kunsthalle Bremen, the curator of the cabinet of prints of 19th and 20th century. Dirk Dobke (born 1966) is a German art historian and curator; he studied art history and classical archaeology and graduated in 1994 with a thesis on the photographer couple Bernd and Hilla Becher. In 1997, Dobke received his doctorate with a thesis on Dieter Roth entitled “Melancholischer Nippes. Dieter Roths frühe Objekte und Materialbilder (1960 to 1975).” Roth himself added sketches and annotations to the manuscript. He appointed Dobke in January 1998 as curator of the Dieter Roth Foundation and the Dieter Roth Museum, which he co-founded. Ina Jessen studied at the Department of Art History at the University of Hamburg between 2007 and 2013, where she received her doctorate in 2019 with her dissertation on Otto Dix and National Socialism. From 2012 to 2015 she was curator of the Dieter Roth Museum, Hamburg and also served from 2013 to 2016 as a research assistant for Françoise Forster-Hahn at University of California, Riverside. Since 2015, Ina Jessen has also held teaching positions on topics related to Dieter Roth, Otto Dix, and political iconography, provenance research, and practice-oriented seminars on printmaking techniques.