Thinking in cycles is key – Sinaida Michalskaja

The artist seeks and finds her motif, the window, in everyday life: For example, Sinaida Michalskaya, with the owner's consent, observed a residential window over a long period of time, perceived not only what she discovers immediately in front of and behind the window, but also the surroundings, and fused this photographically, almost painterly. "The window is an object where ambivalences are negotiated and which unites these contradictions and resolves them," says Sinaida Michalskaya. "It is inside and outside, it is private and public, it is nature and culture, it is not either or, it is both."

Sinaida Mikhalskaya's exhibition recalls the cultural significance of the window, said Dr. Daniel Rakovsky, art historian from Berlin, himself speaking through a TV window in a video message at the opening. In the show, he said, one does not look through the window, but at windows. The windows are never open in the works of Sinaida Michalskaja. The artist uses the interface of the window glass, half transparent, complete transparent, half reflecting. "In this way, Sinaida Michalskaya creates a new world in which all the parts inside and outside can be easily seen and intermingle," Rakovsky said. The photographs on acrylic glass are meant to simulate architecture, the artist said. "I find the interplay of transparency and opacity and reflection in windows fascinating."

Sinaida Michalskaya's window variations open up interesting perspectives, said Stephan Krings, Head of Global Marketing & Communications at KWS, at the exhibition opening. "Her works surprise and create new ways of seeing and thinking." Plant breeders are used to living and working with the cycle of nature, he said. In research, too, it is recurring processes and the unexpectedly opening perspective that provide the key to the result, Stephan Krings alluded to the title of the exhibition, "Thinking in cycles is key."

Sinaida Michalskaja herself works cyclically and thus in cycles, she goes back to earlier works again and again, her artistic way of working is not straightforward - not like a 100-meter race that is completed after the finish line, she says. In her conceptual work, Sinaida Michalskaja combines photography and video films, with which she directs the viewer's gaze: the window is no longer merely an invisible border between two rooms. It becomes a projection surface and a place of encounter between worlds.

Michalskaya plays with reflections, with blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. Houseplants, private objects and reflections of the outside world are interwoven with each other and with the building structure of the window, transforming the photographs into novel still lifes and flower compositions. Some shots show very faintly in the background the reflection of the artist with camera and equipment - a very special self-portrait. Most of the works were taken with an analog camera, which she still uses as she did in the early days of photography with a setting cloth.

Andy, Lucy, Margarete: the windows photographed by Sinaida Michalskaya bear names. A circumstance that pulls them even more out of their strictly utilitarian function. By personifying the object, but also by deliberately choosing the portrait format traditionally intended for portraits, the artist ultimately creates a new genre: the window portrait.

These portraits merge into self-portraits in the S series: In this group of images, Michalskaya photographs her own London window at different times of day.

As in Claude Monet's passionate variations on Rouen Cathedral or the motif of water lilies, the serial process emphasizes the fleeting nature of the compositions: so too does the passage of time inscribe itself on the windows.

In the series "Seal" the artist concentrates on the spaces in between. She unerringly films the light of passing cars. This breaks through the small spaces of the blinds of her window in London. The result is video loops that can put the viewer in a calming, relaxing mood.

_{Exhibition title qu. Angela Merkel}

_{Photos: Julia Lormis}