Allotment garden compositions

Allotment gardens are interesting places, the lined up rectangular plots prove to be opportunities for true creative development. In the current exhibition Behind the Gates, artists Annette Schröter and Gudrun Petersdorff explore just how diverse these gardens, which are designed by people through and through, really are. Petersdorff, who has long explored parks and gardens through painting, has been capturing the individuality of allotment gardens since 2007. Dense, shaped hedges stand next to isolated, wild shrubs, the pictures are sometimes dominated by green, sometimes by a powerful variety of colors. They avoid any expectation of narrative; instead, the pictures strive for complete simplicity and emphasize the beauty of the everyday. Schröter, on the other hand, devotes himself to the design of garden gates from the GDR era. They are unique compositions, creatively crafted by the garden owners. Schröter immortalizes a piece of East German culture in her paper cuts. Behind the Gates was created as a collaboration between Galerie Koenitz and the Kunstraum der HypoVereinsbank in Leipzig, where it can be seen until July 9.

Gudrun Petersdorff, who is taking part in the Art.Salon artist program, lives and works in Leipzig. She was a lecturer at the Academy of Visual Arts there until 2005. Petersdorff was among others awarded the prize of the Frankfurter Förderverein für bildende Kunst in 1992 and the FASA AG Art Prize in 2018. Numerous solo exhibitions have taken her all over Germany as well as to Baarle-Hertog in Belgium, San Francisco and Chicago. Annette Schröter was a professor of painting and graphic art at the same Leipzig university until 2022. After studying painting, she also trained as a porcelain painter, and since 2005 she has devoted herself entirely to paper cutting. Outside Germany, she has exhibited several times in London, Bradford and in group exhibitions in Hanoi and Seoul.