Artworks from Conny Niehoff

Conny Niehoff

Inspiration & Origin

Conny Niehoff, born in Wolmirstedt in 1968, found her visual language early on. For years, the artist has defied fashions and persistently refined her elaborate painting in which material and motif complement each other. Niehoff lives and works freelance in her studio in Colbitz, a rather sedate neighbourhood near Magdeburg. Niehoff enters it daily at set times, including weekends. It is a working discipline that she has maintained for 17 years in the same place. Now and then she gives painting courses in the Munich area and holds workshops in her own studio. The knowledge of transience, visions of the world, normal everyday life and sensitivity for what surrounds us are the themes of Conny Niehoff's paintings. Themes which she develops layer by layer into motifs on canvas. If these themes are initially intuitively subordinated to the colour, they grow out of the picture again through the application of strong structures, without losing their abstraction. The implementation of this "negative technique" is particularly typical of Niehoff's paintings. Layers that were originally applied are only partially covered up again. Selected sections of the background remain. These fixed areas of the painting reappear later as a spectacular focal point in the result and not infrequently prove significant for the overall composition.

Working method

Natural painting materials and acrylics are materials that Conny Niehoff likes to work with. She applies thin glazes layer by layer on canvas. Each previously applied layer is covered over and is thus a thing of the past, but without being absent. Through the transparency inherent in this glazing technique, the working processes become visible as layers. This creates almost deep-spatial structures, which make your works appear three-dimensional. Her choice of colours is rather limited. Conny Niehoff deliberately reduces them to friendly, light, completely natural colours, which nevertheless offer an "inexhaustible scope". The colour white alone, the artist emphasises, "offers a rich and ever new scope in my painting, thanks to unrestrictedly free nuances and variations."
Many sketches precede Conny Niehoff's landscape and nude paintings, and even while the paintings are being created, the artist makes new notes before the motif, which seem like well thought-out, purposeful drafts without the final result.
Niehoff literally captures unbridledness in dialogue with the canvas and balances apparent tensions. Outside and inside, the foreign and the own are effective forces in her painting. The real and the unreal merge. She allows the viewer to see through and ambiguity, lets him participate in the adventure of something new, unknown. Her paintings are diaries of her thoughts and perceptions, show what she has experienced and seen, and yet leave enough room for everyone to make their own interpretation.

Vita

    1968 born in Wolmirstedt
    1987 graduated from high school
    1987 studied education in the field of history
    2000 Business start-up seminar, since then freelance painter
    2012 Lecturer for abstract painting - Academy Wildkogel Kunstfabrik Vienna

National exhibitions (excerpt)

    Culture 8bar Völklingen
    Art Centre Berlin Tegel
    House for Art and Culture Oldau/Hambühren
    Condor Digital Media (Berlin)
    Entre' Ministry of Culture Magdeburg
    Strube Centre/Art
    Romanticism 2.0 Magdeburg
    Art Chapel Remplin
    Autumn Salon MDR Broadcasting House Magdeburg
    Grimma Monastery Church
    Gallery Abstract Moments Dresden

International Exhibitions

    Garibaldi/Mestre Italy
    Amiga Telecom Vienna
    Chagall Gallery Edmonton/Canada