With her reflections on painting and art-historical traditions, Kerstin Brätsch has become an important voice in contemporary art. On December 11, her exhibition MƎTAATEM opens at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, featuring over 100 works.
Like a portal to another world, visitors pass through a kind of labyrinth of color, light, and sound: Kerstin Brätsch transforms the Kunstmuseum Bonn into a living, painterly organism. The internationally renowned artist explores the boundaries of painting and the influences of digital technologies on it. In Brätsch's work, painting constantly takes on new forms and materiality. For example, she digitizes her own brushstrokes and then transforms them into sculptural cement objects. Central to her work is the pictorial representation of feelings, the unconscious, and mental states. The current exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn runs from December 11, 2025, to April 12, 2026. It features over 100 works from the last 15 years, including some of her most recent pieces. The title MƎTAATEM reflects the words meta and Atem (breath). Brätsch alludes to a new series of works in which she explores painting as an expression of physical processes.
Kerstin Brätsch (*1979), originally from Hamburg, lives in Berlin and New York and is known for her reflection on art historical traditions. Her often large-format, abstract paintings combine various materials. The artist contrasts the pure materiality of painting, which radiates a presence of stability and longevity, with the transience of digital images. Through deliberate references to masterpieces of art history, she breaks down male-dominated painting and expands it with modern perspectives. Brätsch is also known for her artist collaborations DAS INSTITUT and KAYA. She has won numerous awards, including the August Macke Prize (2014) and the Edvard Munch Prize (2017). Since 2024, Brätsch has been a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg.
The exhibition was created in cooperation with the MUNCH Museum in Oslo, where it was shown from March to August 2025.
She is a national heroine in Finland, but has only become known internationally in recent years: Helene Schjerfbeck fascinates with her original, simple style. For the first time, a major museum in the USA is presenting her work: Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck opens on December 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
From November 13 to 30, the Fremantle Biennale took place in Australia near Perth, focusing on site-specific contemporary art. Among the exhibiting artists was Raki Nikahetiya with a sensory installation about the intertwining of identity, displacement, and home.
