The gallery is delighted to announce the second solo exhibition by Myriam Holme at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art.

Myriam Holme’s presentation with Bernhard Knaus Fine Art at Art Karlsruhe has just been awarded the fair’s Art Prize by a prominent jury. The prize money enabled the acquisition of an installation-based work for the collection of Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe.

Myriam Holme had previously won the Sparda Art Prize at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in 2017, a prize that was likewise tied to an acquisition. The respective piece is currently on view as part of the art museum’s permanent exhibition.

Dr. Christiane Schürkmann wrote on Myriam Holme’s painting:

Thin, shimmering aluminum panels with traces of color arch in unlikely ways, stress fractures run through smooth and matt surfaces reminiscent of the aesthetic of dry soils or burst ice floes – the painting practice of artist Myriam Holme, born in 1971 in Mannheim, employs tension and pressure. Constricted image formats burst open, curved and contorted surfaces expand space and transcend into installations and sculptural shapes. Holme, Master Student of Andreas Slominski since 2002, gets to grips with materials in a very hands-on fashion – at times applying enormous force. The materials employed by the artist and their unusual use thus play a crucial role in her artistic practice: Myriam Holme elicits unforeseen painterly qualities from materials such as aluminum, soap, stains and ink by blow-drying them, bending them and exerting pressure in the relevant places.

Myriam Holme’s art is rooted in the experimental sphere. The testing of material reactions and combinations in terms of their aesthetic effect is thus the subject of her oeuvre, and in particular the expansion of painting at the point where it meets installation and spatial art. The artist’s openness and curiosity towards the unknown interplay between the different materials meet chemical and physical reactions between the combined materials that take on a dynamic of their own. Artist and material work together – but there is also a certain amount of struggle involved, for example when the aim is to get aluminum to act as a support for the paint applied to it, or a material is to be bent by physical (oftentimes bodily) force. The artistic practice itself is characterized by the tension that arises between artist and material, as well as by the artist’s enormous professionality in handling the various materials deployed – in the words of the artist: She knows what she wants the material to do.

For her pieces in aluminum, Myriam Holme often works with used offset plates, entering into dialogue with their traces of use, created through heat and rolling. By shaping the plates, she then also conceptually extends the tension inherent in the pieces: Painting leaves the convention of the flat image carrier behind, occupies space and can be experienced sculpturally. In her works made using soap, this aspect can be found in the abovementioned stress fractures. Here, painting is not restricted to the pictorial, but becomes a sculptural object.

In its experimental features, the art of Myriam Holme can also be described as alchemistic material research with an enormous aesthetic impact: Rainbow-like color gradients stretch across shiny and metallic shimmering surfaces as in the aluminum pieces, while striking cracks and ruptures traverse the smooth and almost polished-seeming surfaces like lines drawn through the varied colors in the paintings using soap. Beauty including its brittleness, materiality including its fragility, power including its delicateness culminate in the works, challenging us to perceive them from near and afar.

Myriam Holme has been honored for her experimental works numerous times – most recently with the Sparda Art Prize “Expanded Painting” in the context of her solo exhibition “Kubus” at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Her works are exhibited in museums and exhibition venues in Germany and abroad.