Curatorial Statement

Silke Sturm’s paintings are built from encounters between images that do not ordinarily belong together. Fragments of art history, advertising, graffiti, cartoons, photography and contemporary media are assembled into compositions that feel both familiar and unsettling.

Rather than quoting these sources literally, Sturm translates them through the physical and emotional language of oil painting. Figures, gestures, objects and atmospheric spaces are detached from their original contexts and brought into new relationships. Contrasting visual worlds may coexist within a single work: elegance and rupture, humour and unease, nostalgia and contemporary tension.

This collision of references creates paintings that remain deliberately open. They may suggest psychological situations or narrative possibilities, yet resist a single, definitive interpretation. The viewer is invited to move through layers of association and to construct an individual reading from the visual clues offered by the painting.

Sturm’s approach can be understood as a form of painterly pastiche, but one shaped by critical distance and dry humour. By combining culturally familiar images with unexpected shifts in scale, atmosphere and context, she reflects on how contemporary life is mediated through inherited symbols, commercial imagery and an increasingly dense visual environment.

Her large formats intensify this experience. The viewer encounters the image not as a distant illustration, but as an immersive visual field in which colour, gesture and surface carry as much meaning as the represented motifs. The painterly process remains visible, allowing the works to move between figuration and expressive transformation.

At the centre of Sturm’s practice lies an interest in ambiguity: the moment when an image can no longer be reduced to its source or explained through a single story. Her paintings create spaces in which cultural memory, personal perception and contemporary commentary meet without resolving into a fixed conclusion.