Paula Doepfner
Paula Doepfner (born in Berlin - July 1980) is a contemporary artist. Her work includes text-based drawings, performances, and objects made of ice, organic matter, and damaged armored glass. [1] She lives and works in Berlin.
Paula Doepfner studied fine arts from 2002 to 2008, at the Universität der Künste Berlin and at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She studied under Roger Ackling in London and graduated from the masterclass Rebecca Horn in Berlin. She has received numerous prizes and stipends, among others the Hans Platschek prize (2024), the Krull foundation work stipend (2023), the Konrad Adenauer Foundation EHF stipend (2021/22), the work stipend of the Albert Koechlin foundation, Lucerne (2010), and the Else Neumann stipend from the City of Berlin (2008). [2]
Doepfner’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with institutional solo exhibitions at the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden (2023), the Akademie der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (2022), and the Goethe-Institut, Washington, D.C. (2015). She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions including the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum at the Charité (2023),) [3] the Museum Reinickendorf, Berlin (2022), and the Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2013). Her works are held in private and public collections such as the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Leipzig, and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. [4]
Paula Doepfner’s artistic practice comprises drawings, performances, and objects made of ice, glass, and organic matter. [5] The content of her work is drawn from literary texts and documents relating to human rights abuses and the Holocaust. Her drawings consist of minute script on transparent paper; she writes lines of text in tiny letters (ø = 1 mm) to form textual images. The drawings are based on sketches she makes while observing autopsies and brain surgery at the Charité University Hospital Berlin. [6] The strings of text in her drawings are taken from the Istanbul Protocol, a UN handbook on the investigation and documentation of torture and other cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, and from documentary material on the children of Auschwitz. Paula Doepfner combines these documentary texts with literary works by the likes of Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Joyce Mansour and Robert Musil.
For her glass works Paula Doepfner makes color sketches of regions of the brain, transferring them onto the glass, usually large pieces of glass, with pigment and varnish. She uses armored glass from commercial units and luxury buildings that have been damaged during demonstrations. Some of the glass works hang on the wall, others stand in space. [7]
Paula Doepfner’s ice blocks, which weigh up to 500 kg, either melt into metal trays in the gallery space before evaporating, or run off into the ground when exhibited in public space. [8] Inside the blocks Doepfner freezes paper inscribed with texts. The inscribed pieces of paper are frozen into the center of the transparent ice blocks.
For her sound performances Doepfner works together with a musician, usually a double-bass player. The double-bass player plays just one note in microtonal intervals while Doepfner makes sounds with foliage and dried shrubbery. [9]
Paula Doepfner’s works “incorporate the passing of time and reveal internal organic structures. They are always based on human experience.” [10] Her work deals with the “darkest aspects of human existence” [11] and transforms them “into something almost material, physical, something that’s not just symbolic but also a remnant, a trace of something, of language, of life, even her own life. Neither imagery nor poetry, it’s something that has to be regarded forensically, as fact.” [12]
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