Christine Brey’s artistic practice centers on highly detailed graphite drawings that combine technical precision with a quiet emotional charge. Her works often explore the inner tension between stillness and psychological movement, and she frequently works with recurring motifs related to water, memory and the fragile states between thought and action. Her drawings are lifelike and monochrome, marked by a sense of seriousness and timeless concentration. Brey has a deep interest in the element of water, which she uses as both a symbolic and compositional force within her drawings.
Brey studied visual arts in Würzburg and Hamburg, completing both her BA and MA with a focus on drawing. She studied with artists such as Marco Wagner, André Rösler, Anke Feuchtenberger and Gesa Lange, who influenced her interest in narrative drawing and the expressive potential of the line. In 2019 she undertook a formative artist residency in Morocco, where she also created participatory art projects with children in the desert region of Erfoud. This experience broadened the cultural and thematic scope of her work and strengthened her engagement with social contexts.
Her exhibition history includes presentations at MuseumsQuartier Vienna, SMAC Berlin, Kunsthalle Niendorf and Kunsthaus Hamburg, as well as numerous group shows across Germany and Europe. She has been active in drawing based initiatives such as the Inside Draftswomen collective, which she co founded in 2019. Brey is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including the Bergkristall Award for best bachelor thesis and a series of cultural grants from Hamburg. Public collections such as the German Emigration Museum and the Martin von Wagner Museum have acquired her work. She continously develops her practice that is at once introspective and outward looking, shaping graphite into a language of clarity, delicacy and subtle emotional resonance.
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Men made the boat for the water (Give me a smile), 2025 Sold
Christine Brey was born on 6 April 1985 in Freiburg, Germany, and lives and works in Hamburg. She completed her BA in Visual Arts at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg between 2012 and 2016, studying drawing under Marco Wagner and André Rösler. She went on to complete her MA in Visual Arts in Hamburg from 2017 to 2020, working under Anke Feuchtenberger and Gesa Lange, two artists whose engagement with narrative drawing and the expressive potential of the line shaped the direction of her practice. In 2016 she received the Bergkristall Award for best bachelor thesis from the Faculty of Design in Würzburg. In 2019 she was awarded a travel grant for a master's research trip to Morocco, where she undertook an artist residency and led participatory art projects with children in the desert region of Erfoud, an experience that broadened the cultural and thematic scope of her work and deepened her engagement with social contexts.
Graphite is Christine Brey's primary material, and drawing is the lens through which she examines the world. Her works are monochrome and lifelike, built through the patient accumulation of marks that give her images a quality of concentrated stillness. She is drawn to the psychological territory between thought and action, between surface and depth, and returns repeatedly to water as a motif that is at once symbolic and compositional. Water's reflective and boundary-dissolving qualities make it an ideal vehicle for the states of mind she explores: memory, suspension, fragility. Her drawings do not narrate so much as hold a moment in sustained attention, shaping graphite into a language of clarity, delicacy, and subtle emotional resonance.
Brey has received consistent recognition through grants and awards. Alongside the Bergkristall Award, she has received grants from Hamburg Kreativgesellschaft (2024), the Cafe Royal Kulturstiftung (2019, 2024, 2025), the districts of Hamburg-Eimsbüttel, Hamburg-Altona, and Hamburg-Mitte, and the Jung und Gegenständlich Award from Galerie Bodenseekreis (2020). She was shortlisted for the STRABAG Art Award in Vienna (2023), nominated for the European Art Prize of the Bernd and Gisela Rosenheim Foundation (2022), and nominated again for the STRABAG Art Award in 2026. Her work has been published in Kunstforum International (2026) and the anthology Culture Kaleidoscope: 100 Contemporary Artists of Our Time (Prazzle Arts, 2025). Public collections holding her work include the German Emigration Museum in Bremerhaven, the Martin-von-Wagner Museum in Würzburg (Graphic Collection), Galerie Bodenseekreis in Meersburg, the House of City History in Offenbach am Main, and Poolhaus in Hamburg-Blankenese.
Her exhibition history includes solo presentations at MuseumsQuartier Vienna (2018), SMAC Berlin (2023), Kunsthalle Niendorf (2024), and Kunsthaus Hamburg (2024), as well as group exhibitions at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2019), the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2024), Kunsthaus Rhenania Cologne (2024), and the International Congress of Drawing in Bogotá (2018). In 2019 Brey co-founded Inside Draftswomen, a collective dedicated to contemporary drawing practice, through which she has organised and participated in exhibitions across Hamburg and beyond. KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presented Christine Brey in the group exhibition Popcorn und Saure Gurken at 69salon by KORNFELD, Berlin, in 2026.
