Marlen Letetzki _ Luggage of Longings

"Nothing fascinates me more than the process of image creation, when color becomes an image. (...) and the image begins to oscillate between material and illusion." (M.L.)

Currently, Marlen Letetzki is intensively exploring the combination of different techniques. Using 3D graphics software, she models her objects, image quotes, media found objects in what are actually sculptural processes and assembles them in painterly translation, sometimes using watercolor, oil paint and/or acrylic. The artist builds her structureless canvas from aluminum, so that in the end nothing but the image is to be seen. She opposes the smooth surface, which almost hides the process of painting, with rough brushstrokes, which sometimes function as a staging of a quick gesture by meticulously coloring the structure afterwards. What looks like a performative action turns out to be a simulation and celebrates itself as imagination in the eye and mind of the viewer.

In this way, Marlen Letetzki's painting stands antithetically and at the same time mimetically to digitality. She fetishizes the handmade, the materialities, the analog.

Marlen Letetzki (born 1990 in Weimar, lives and works in Berlin) studied at the UdK, Berlin with Pia Fries and Christine Streuli while completing her master with Prof. Gregory Cumins. She also studied philosophy at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. In 2016, Marlen Letetzki received the Master Student Prize of the President of UdK and in 2021 a scholarship by Dorothea Konwiarz Stiftung. Since 2021 Letetzki holds a guest lectureship at UdK Berlin (in painting/drawing).

Marlen Letetzki presented solo exhibitions at Palais Eger Berlin (2023, curated by Harald Theiss), Dorothea Konwiarz Stiftung Berlin (2022), Kunstverein KunstHaus Potsdam (2022), FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph (2022, 2021, 2018), at Salonabend in Bochum (2017) and at M1 Berlin

(2015). The artist has been involved in group exhibitions at Galerie Mark Müller Zürich (2021), Bethanien, Berlin (2017),Trikot, Basel (2017), Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2016), Galerie Christine König, Vienna (2016), in Projecta Engineering, Modena (2014) a.o..