Art has accompanied A.R.Grachenfels throughout her life. Already at a young age, in a responsible position, she designed work and living spaces according to artistic aspects, leading people in sociotherapeutic contexts to their own creative ideas with clay, wood, paint and paper. She recognized the importance of art for people with disabilities at an early stage and encouraged them in their search for their personal artistic expression (Art Brut).

In addition to the pencil, photography has played a bigger role for A.R.Grachenfels in recent years. With an alert eye she sees her surroundings, recognizes structures and relationships that are not immediately obvious. The digitally recorded image, also from one’s own analogue hand drawings, is understood as a material that is comparable to the clay for a sculpture or a root found in the forest, whose given shape can be reinterpreted. How does the soul of the picture show itself, what does it want to tell? Which comment is necessary? Which possibilities are hidden? Sometimes the pursuit of different approaches in the picture through graphic interventions using the textures of the picture leads to very different results. As ARGrachenfels picks up on many divergent facets of her environment and thinks further, her pictures also have a wide range, from photos in the more classical sense to completely abstract shapes and colors, from the gloomy gray to the brightly colored, from the clearly outlined to the shadowy Blurring, from the powerfully flat to the finely chiseled.

Whether the basic structures of photography or the graphic pen will play a larger role in the creative process is neither predictable nor important. The artistic work follows the intuitive design rather than thinking / reflecting on the images that are drawn.

Since 2016, A.R.Grachenfels has presented selected works in private and public spaces.

Image and viewing

Pictures can be objectively described, but what is described is not what is shown. This lies behind the outside – inside the viewer, in our knowledge, in our experience. This is all the more true, the less representational a picture is. In the search for the recognizable, we always find something that we can link to our experiences.