TAMMAM AZZAM

Tammam Azzam (*1980 Syria) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He received his artistic training from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus. Following the Syrian Civil War, he relocated to Dubai where he began working in digital photomontages. In 2016 Azzam moved to Germany, with a residency at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Delmenhorst. There and later in Berlin the artist began exploring a new technique in paper-collage alongside his paintings. His fragmented compositions highlight the physical remnants of conflict and showcase the importance to rebuild and create from destruction.
His compositions ask questions, but they do not provide answers. Particularly, they ask about the "Conditio Humana," the general human condition whose destructive and disruptive forces bring suering and despair into the world, but which, with its wonderful creations, also always gives us cause for hope. This tragedy, but also this power to give hope, is the focus of Tammam Azzam's works, which create a whole new ensemple from fragments.
On closer inspection, the many small scraps of paper seem to tell their own story, jumping from one piece of paper to the next. We notice the cracks and gaps between them and see that they are separated and broken or tattered. But if we take a step back, they join together to form fascinating painterly compositions of small and tiny paper scraps, which the artist has previously painted with acrylic.

RAO FU

Rao Fu (*1978 China) lives and works in Dresden, Germany. He has had numerous international solo and group exhibitions in Asia, Europe and the United States. Fu has also partaken in renowned art fairs such as Art Basel in Hong Kong, Art Taipei, Art021 Shanghai, and Asia Now between others.
Rao Fu follows the Chinese method of using color to enhance the atmospheric. No concrete landscapes can be assigned to Fu's depiction. They are rather felt zones of security in which he embeds his pictorial vocabulary. But the manner in which the artist combines what he has seen, imagined, and dreamed in comparison with images from art history betrays precision work. He shows us that the distant is not distant, but rather quite local and present. His paintings are less about cultural dierence than about the debate on cultural hybridity. Part of the artist’s process are appropriating things through adaptation and generating new knowledge through innovation. In some paintings the adaptive force is stronger than in others.
There is a lot in these pictures: baroque world theater, romantic longing, and figures scaled down in the Chinese way of thinking, shuddering in front of an overwhelming natural backdrop. There are always two roots that feed his thinking and feeling - one Chinese and one European.
(Christoph Tannert)

RUSUDAN KHIZANISHVILI

Rusudan Khizanishvili (*1979 Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. Deeply influenced by the duality of spirit and soul as it was expressed in medieval art, her paintings create a cathedral of dynamic tension that springs from the artistic imagination. Questions of the self, connections to biology, cultural myths, and the female body are the subject of constant inquiry for Khizanishvili. She invites viewers into multi layered portals of distorted figures and animals who act as symbolic door handles between cultures, nations, times and identities.
She earned her two BFAs in painting at the J. Nikoladze Art School and the Tbilisi State Academy of Art. In 2004, Khizanishvili received her MA in film studies from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. Over the past 15 years Rusudan Khizanishvili has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions across all of Europe, the US and Asia including at the Museum of Modern Art Tbilisi, the Literary Museum of Georgia, the Mark Rothko Foundation, the New Image Art Gallery, Art Busan, KIAF Seoul, Untitled Miami, Seojung Art and Art021 Shanghai. In 2015, Khizanishvili represented Georgia alongside five other artists at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. Her works are in the collection of the Georgian National Museum, the private collection of Stefan Simchowitz, LA, and the Breus Foundation, Moscow.