 |
Isa Melsheimer (born September 19, 1968, in Neuss) [1] is a German sculptor, object and installation artist, painter and university lecturer. [2]
|
Isa Melsheimer (born September 19, 1968, in Neuss) [1] is a German sculptor, object and installation artist, painter and university lecturer. [2]
Isa Melsheimer grew up on a vineyard in Reil on the Moselle. From 1991 to 1997, she studied painting at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin (now Berlin University of the Arts) in the Georg Baselitz master class. [3]
After a substitute semester in Björn Dahlem's class at the Bauhaus University Weimar and a guest professorship for experimental drawing at the Braunschweig University of Art, she has been Professor of Ceramics in the Fine Arts program at the Muthesisus Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel since the winter semester 2022.
Isa Melsheimer lives and works in Berlin.
Isa Melsheimer’s artistic work engages with organically evolved and constructed living spaces. Her interest lies in the conditions that emerge in the process of designing and transforming these environments. She focuses both on the history of built structures, from individual architectural forms and urban fabrics to natural formations, and on the influence of human activity on ecological systems. [4]
Melsheimer primarily works with ceramics but also uses materials such as concrete, glass, metal, wood, yarn, fabric, plants, and everyday objects. [5] In addition to her sculptural works, she produces an ongoing series of gouaches.
A central aspect of her work is the creation of fragile, often surreal-looking dwellings and architectural fragments that appear as excerpts of a larger, not fully comprehensible whole. In these, Melsheimer explores how spaces come into being, how they change, and what cultural, social, and ecological meanings they carry. [6]
Her often site-specific installations weave together subjective memories, symbols, and historical events into multi-layered spatial structures. In these, past and present, nature and architecture overlap.
Art historian and curator Verena Gamper describes Isa Melsheimer’s engagement with the built environment in her ceramics as a multifaceted process. According to Gamper, the works “oscillate in their appearance between fragment and model, between the made and the grown, between the artificial and the natural-unified beneath glazes that recall efflorescences, oxidized stones, lichens, or layers of earth.” [7]
In their materiality and formal language, the works open up a field of diverse associations, from (utopian) architectural models to animal constructions and organic structures. “In their hybrid appearance, between model-like experimental arrangements of human dwellings and the habitats of other living beings, between the man-made, the animal, and the grown, the ceramics suggest that this architectural process is situated in a world no longer shaped by human intervention.” [8]
Works by Isa Melsheimer are held in the following public collections:
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
