For Annina Roescheisen, color is the result of a ritual that precedes each painting. For this, she mixes pigments, charcoal, ash, ink, and acrylic, while also adding other substances such as herb and salts. This alchemical process transforms the canvas into something living: into a field of resonance in which colors pulsate, evoke the most varied associations,
and condense into subtle forms and landscapes from which one does not quickly emerge.
Born in Rosenheim in 1982, Annina Roescheisen now lives in New York: her professional path has led from working as an artist’s assistant to Sotheby’s auction house and on to curatorial projects, yet she never attended art school. This means her approach blends the fearlessness of the autodidact with a
background in art history and philosophy. The former allows her not to let her imagination be constrained by academic rules of craft and to unite colors that, by the standards of technique, are not meant to be combined. The latter enables her to understand contemporary art as an outcome of history—though her particular passion lies in medieval art and its powerful iconographic character.
Like the painters of that era, Roescheisen understands her work more as revelation than representation. Playing with mysticism and symbolism, she sends us on a journey that transcends the visible world. When looking back through the lens of cultural history, it shows that the boundaries between natural and supernatural, miracles and science are mutable and porous. This is the backdrop against which Roescheisen seeks out forms of self-expression. In her "Flying Dragons" series, she focuses on the Physiologus. This book
of natural history dates back to the second or third century and contains allegorical tales assigning moral and symbolic traits to animals and fantastic creatures. "Dragons are invisible, yet they express a force akin to that of emotions," says Roescheisen. "They’re real, even if undocumented in science."
The artist explored her own inner imagery and imaginative world in a series of watercolors that she prepared for during a six-month period in which she drew with her eyes closed. Her aim was to understand how our visual perception of objects changes from infancy through childhood
and into adulthood. By doing so, she could ascertain what might once have been visible to us but now no longer is.
According to Roescheisen, the red thread running through her oeuvre (which includes videos and performances)
is an exploration of the boundary between the visible and invisible. In some of
her works on display during the opening days of the Venice Biennale, a red thread
is literally sewn into the paper or the canvas: it runs from the front to the back of the work and back again, tracing a meandering path to unite presence and transcendence. Those existential questions just won't stop rearing their heads.