Art Cologne 2026
Dirimart returns to Art Cologne with a presentation of six artists living and working in Germany: Ayşe Erkmen, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Karin Kneffel, Anselm Reyle, Nasan Tur and Jorinde Voigt. Bringing together distinct approaches to material, image and form, the presentation explores how artists transform familiar objects and systems to challenge establish ways of perceiving and interpreting the world.
Across the presentation, familiar materials and systems are reconfigured to reveal new meanings. In Pantone II (2014), Ayşe Erkmen translates the annual Pantone colour palette into a movable arrangement of hinged panels, turning colour into an exploration of space and interaction. Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, meanwhile, investigate how political and social structures shape identity, belonging and our relation with the natural world. In But I Kept Going (2022), the distance swum by Ameer Mehtr from Türkiye to the Greek island of Samos is translated into an abstract horizon, linking an individual experience of migration to broader questions of borders and belonging. Not Yet a Still Life (Europe) (2021-2023) brings together endangered plant species in an imaginary bouquet that draws attention to ecological fragility and the threat of extinction.
Karin Kneffel and Nasan Tur approach the relationship between images and reality from distinct perspectives, exploring how images shape our understanding of reality, history and collective experience. Kneffel's meticulously rendered photorealistic paintings create perceptual ambiguities, with monumental still lifes depicting grapes and tulips at an exaggerated scale. Through precise detail, reflections and carefully constructed compositions, she unsettles the familiar, while her photographic works playfully blur the distinction between reality and fiction. Tur, by contrast, examines ideology, resistance and political power. In Traces (2021), his first drawing installation, he revisits the origins of image-making through a contemporary reinterpretation of prehistoric cave paintings. Combining traced hand outlines with modernist abstraction, expressive colour and repetitive patterns, he connects early forms of pictorial expression with children's drawings today, reflecting on the enduring human impulse to create images.
Anselm Reyle recontextualises found materials, including crumpled aluminium foil, burlap, scrap metal and discarded neon signs. Combining industrial textures with vivid colour and artificial light, he challenges the boundaries between everyday visual culture and art.
Jorinde Voigt translates time, movement and sensory experience into intricate visual compositions, drawing on music, philosophy and phenomenology. Working with ink, graphite and watercolour, she combines systems of notation with expressive lines and layered forms. In Study on Potential and Coincidence III (2020), she explores possibility and chance through complex visual structures, moving between systematic observation and subjective experience.
Together, the artists demonstrate how materials, images and systems can be reconfigured to reveal the assumptions underpinning our experience of the world. From the ways we interpret visual information to the political, social and environmental structures that shape contemporary life, their practices invite us to reconsider how meaning is constructed and perception formed.
