Statement

I am fascinated by the complexity of a moment: movement, atmosphere, emotions – the “inner landscape” from which every experienced moment is kaleidoscopically composed.

In my mixed media paintings, drawings and artist books I combine spontaneity and intuition with conscious compositions. This creates images in which figuration and abstraction dynamically intertwine, expressive colour applications meet fine drawings or collages – sometimes also texts.

I work with layering, superimposition, and play with transparency to make the fleeting nature of moments visible and to make space for the unspoken.

I find my motifs in landscape and the human form. The cycle of becoming and passing away touches and inspires me time and again, as it inherently embodies the dialectic of momentary appearance, change, and memory.

Biography

Anja Ehrenberg is an artist, mother of three children and has been living in Berlin since 1999.

Born in 1970 in Bonn Bad Godesberg, she spent her childhood in the Voreifel – in a landscape that shapes her perception of material, nature and forms.

As a child, she dug clay from the Eifel soil with her bare hands to mold vessels and figures for her play. In the forest, she collected animal bones and arranged them into displays on the shelves in her room. On her long walk to school, which she made alone every day, clouds drifted past her like images. She spun stories to accompany them, played different characters with different voices, and sang her own invented songs on endless repeat. This close connection to nature, to materiality, and to the power of imagination remains a common thread running through her artistic work to this day.

In addition to drawing and painting, she discovered other forms of expression for herself as a teenager in dance and theatre. She studied “Applied Theatre Studies” at the University of Gießen, at the Lola-Rogge School Hamburg and completed her studies in stage dance and choreography at the EDDC (European Dance Development Centre) at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Arnhem, Netherlands, with a diploma in 1998. She staged her own dance theatre plays and designed stage designs, worked as an actress, dancer and choreographer in Germany and abroad, before focussing primarily on visual work from 2010.

Initially working as an illustrator for editorials, she now paints and draws independently, creates artist’s books, and is a passionate art communicator. She regularly presents her art in books at Artbook Berlin and in performative readings. Her paintings, which reflect an intense engagement with movement, theater, and nature, can be experienced in exhibitions and private collections.

Anja Ehrenberg’s unique style of visual art stems from her experience with these different forms of creative expression.