Artists At Home: Between Familiar Environments And New Perspectives

A variety of circumstances have led to artists being isolated from society. Depending on the situation, a time of solitude can be welcome or uninvited, deliberate or involuntary. Many artists have thrived and produced their best work away from the clamour of society, intentionally turning towards an isolating experience. However, in a time of global crisis, artists had to adapt their ways of working in order to continue making art. During times of war and violent oppression, artists were unable to access necessary materials, therefore artistic production tended to be hugely limited or non-existent. The ongoing pandemic tossed the Western world into a strange, abundant seclusion – where everything is accessible as a consequence of globalization, yet physical contact is so limited in some areas, the outside world is reminiscent of warfare. Artists may even need to explore whether being creative during such a time is possible. There can be pressure on us all to be creative during a time when we are distanced from the flow of our normal lives.

Each experience of isolation is unique and artists express their creativity during these times in their own ways. We have selected and spoken to artists living and working in Berlin, Denmark, and New York City to reveal new artistic perspectives that their isolating experience created, taking inspiration from proximity, the feeling of home, the airy and empty cities as well as transforming the now constant digital experiences into tangible pieces. The making process itself proved to be an antidote for many, a form of self-therapy or coping mechanism for isolation and anxiety.

Maria Kassab: Of Colours & Isolation

In the wake of the first stay at home orders, Lebanese visual artist Maria Kassab returned to painting, a medium she had largely left behind at art school. Kassab’s primary bodies of work are deeply rooted in and inspired by the political climate of Lebanon. Her photomontages and analogue collages recreate stories about her experience at an early age at the time of the civil war torn country. Until the lockdown hit Beirut, she had been primarily creating works representative of her personal memory. A frequently underlying theme of her works are displacement and separation, like her series called Home Is Fiction, that she started during the 2019 revolution: “I never felt home in my country. There is no safety, there is no unity”.

During the revolution came another crisis, the pandemic that brought a return to her former practice, to painting. Kassab’s ongoing series of paintings on paper, the Of Colors & Isolation series depicts herself in fictional perspectives and invented settings at her Beirut and Berlin homes. “My first lockdown happened from March through April in Beirut. By not being able to go out, to get inspired, to pursue my creative process and do visual work, I felt that I needed to work again with my bare hands”, explains Kassab. “I was yearning for colours… Vibrant colors! I started doing self-portraits and was watching myself manifested in a fictitious milieu, in interiors that were colourful and peaceful. Colors made me feel safe. The nudity in these self portraits refers to childhood, and innocence. At this point, with the second lockdown that I am living through, but now in Berlin, I also need to explore my isolation embedded in a new city and see how my paintings will work on this territory. Maybe this time, the paintings will be even more colorful”.

Erik A. Frandsen: Karantænebilleder (Quarantine Images)

Karantænebilleder is an unscheduled, spontaneous effort from one of Denmark’s most acclaimed painters, Erik A. Frandsen. Painted at a frantic pace just over ten weeks, the images tell the story of the self-exiled artist having only his immediate surroundings to reflect upon. From the self-prescribed quarantine of his Falster studio, Frandsen has spent lockdown observing and painting almost compulsively. Karantænebilleder is not as much about the current societal crisis, as it is the artist’s personal account of being confined to his studio, truly alone with colours and canvases. This process has yielded a unique series of paintings that are a joyous tour in the mundanity of home life.