In her first solo show in Chicago, Franziska Holstein presents a series of works on paper using metal-plate lithography. Each print refers to a single painting; the entire project incorporates all of the paintings she’s made since 2010. Extracting a single geometric form from each source image, she then works through the composition using collage. This strategy runs counter to her approach to painting, where she intensely controls the composition and builds up the images and surfaces via a more involved, long-term process. The collages are developed not by control, but by informality and intuition; arriving at an end point comes quickly and with little conceptual interference. In this series, she doesn’t allow herself to force the arrangement of the single forms on the paper or direct where they might land. Randomness, coming as a result of previously orchestrated strategies, gives the work a fresh and enlivened clarity.
Franziska Holstein was born in Leipzig in 1978. She attended the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts from 2000 to 2005 where she studied with Arno Rink. From 2005 to 2008 she was a Master Student of Neo Rauch. Her work has been shown internationally in numerous venues including Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Spesshardt & Klein in Berlin and Kunsthalle Rostock, among many others. In December 2011, she received a grant from the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation; at that time she presented a two-person exhibition with Robert Seidel. In April 2012, she was an artist-in-residence for three-months in Colombus, Ohio sponsored by the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) and the Ministry for Science and Art of the State of Saxony. She was also a resident artist for six months at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Franziska Holstein lives and works in Leipzig, Germany, and is represented by Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin.