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As an artist, I am driven by my need to make things, to explore and follow my curiosity. Painting for me is a room of my own, a masterless domain that contrasts to my rigorous academic training as a scholar of literature and culture. As a child my arts-centered schooling matched my desire to combine stories and painting, to doodle and paint on every available surface. My process often begins with an initial vision of color or an engagement with a theme or narrative and then evolves organically in the act of painting. This approach, enriched by my scholarly background, has become a consistent practice, intertwining academic rigour and thought with the spontaneity of and radical openness of artistic creation.

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The body - seen as grotesque and alien, a site of both violence and desire, comical and gruesome in equal measure, features in many of my paintings. I wedge bodies between abstraction and figuration, as biomorphic shapes and concrete body parts. This engagement for me is also a deeply personal one as someone who has experienced the unreliability, the fragility and astounding resilience of my own body early on.

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In one of my figurative series, I depict mythological figures, undercutting traditional male driven narratives of sex and desire. Women feature as agents of sex and violence rather than targets. The slippage between the grotesque and the uncanny is visible for example in the green series, where a kiss appears as an act of eating the other, or in the large triptych BITCH, I AM A MONSTER that  amalgamates various cultural notions of monstrosity.

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My preference for large formats stems from my deeply embodied and kinetic experience of painting. The expansiveness of a large canvas allows for a range of motion that facilitates complete immersion in both the vision and process. This physical engagement is an essential aspect of my creative expression, manifesting in rhythmical and musical brushstrokes that favor improvisation and strive for a cohesive visual whole.

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Music is a profound source of inspiration. From Baroque compositions to hip-hop beats and jazz improvisations, music often becomes the starting point for a series or an individual works. This influence is evident in pieces like 'Folly,' a large triptych inspired by a baroque piece, and 'First,' which embodies the spirit of a drum beat and jazz improvisation.

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Color, for me, transcends its visual element; it is an atmospheric psychography that fosters a creative tension between clarity and ambiguity, depth and surface. I mix my own colors using raw pigments for their vibrancy and combine unconventional materials on my canvases from oil, acrylics, chalk and found materials that I incorporate. My approach to structure and dimensionality involves variations of opacity and transparency, with a preference for playing with the liquidity of paint or layering it thickly and applying it with construction tools rather than with a brush. A recent series that showcases this approach is SPECTRAL LIGHT, featuring four pieces that think about color as a trick of light, a spectrum reaching to the outer limits of vibrancy.

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Based in Berlin, I am immersed in a dynamic artistic community, which offers endless opportunities for collaboration and inspiration. My work, internationally exhibited and featured in private collections across France, the US, and Germany, is a reflection of this vibrant exchange and of course I am deeply indebted to my true teachers, my contemporaries and the giants before me.

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Artists like Cy Twombly with his tender and musical mark making on large canvases, Cecily Brown with her inspiring method of blurring abstraction and figuration and lending from current image culture, Miriam Cahn and Francis Bacon as radical pioneers of the intersection of violence and sexuality, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell both for their very different and powerful use of color, one more melodic and atmospheric and the other more rhythmically and intense have deeply influenced my own exploration of the bodily and ways of working with color in abstraction. They and my contemporaries accompany me in finding my own voice that is both a continuation and a departure from their legacies, marking my unique place in the contemporary art world.