INTERVIEW WITH ISABELL ALEXANDRA MELDNER

In 2023, the young artist Isabell Alexandra Meldner received the prestigious Caspar David Friedrich Prize from the Friedrich Society. The jury particularly praised her poetic visual language and her impressive sensitivity to color, light, and shadow. Born in Berlin, the student at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts distinguishes herself through the thoughtful fusion of various media in her works.

In conversation with Hatje Cantz, Isabell Alexandra Meldner discusses recurring Friedrich moments and the significance of nature and time for her own artistic work.

Hatje Cantz: Have you experienced a very personal Friedrich moment in your life that you would like to tell us about?

Isabell Alexandra Meldner: When I take the time to view the world from a different perspective, I experience such moments in everyday scenarios. In my experience, this perspective arises from a deliberate form of perception, which is probably more akin to the contemplation of artistic works. Specifically, I think, for example, of the moment when the sun disappears behind the horizon or the gaze into the endless expanse of the sky or the sea. Phenomena of a magnitude that are incomprehensible or not fully experienceable from our human perspective interest me in my artistic practice. These are precisely the moments we are confronted with in some of Friedrich's paintings, making us aware of our own perception. Conversely, I recall a conversation with Holger Birkholz in front of Friedrich's paintings at the Albertinum in Dresden. In that conversation, I realized that in Friedrich's painting, the depiction of light situations or morning and evening moods is essential. The fact that such simple, everyday conditions became motifs more than two centuries ago makes them appear as timeless topoi. Art historically, I find it exciting how essential, abstract themes, such as longing or the relationship of man to the world, become experienceable with such immediacy of depiction. Through their visual representation and framing, the paintings heighten our attention to such sights. While engaging with Friedrich's work in preparation for my exhibition Time Takes too Long to Last at the Caspar David Friedrich Centre, I found more and more parallels to my own work, enabling me to develop a new perspective on my own practice.

I am Nowhere, Sun Behind White Skies © Isabell Alexandra Meldner

HC: Can you tell us what elements from Friedrich's work you have incorporated into your own artworks and what role they play in your artistic practice?

IM: I see a clear connection to Friedrich's work in rediscovering emotional states in the world around us: in my artistic work, Friedrich's landscapes are more spaces of experience that encourage contemplation. In doing so, I create time-based experiences that make viewers reflect on themselves – in a similar way to how this happens in Friedrich's works. For me, it's about relating to the world and becoming aware of one's own perspective. The motif of the window is particularly important to me, continuously occupying me in several works. As in Friedrich's View from the Artist's Window, for me too, these are motifs of longing and distance in contrast to the viewer's position in the interior. In my works, I understand the curtain as a symbol of the longing for home, but also of disorientation, displacement, and the impossibility of being able to locate oneself in the world. In contrast to the expression of 'being-in-the-world' in Friedrich's landscapes, here often arises the impression of a certain placelessness, which I generally attribute to exhibition spaces. A window that becomes a picture or – conversely – the picture as a window is an idea that fundamentally motivated the concept of the exhibition in Greifswald: the series Until Light Arrives (2023) explores sunlight as a fundamental condition for the creation of images. Here, photographs of the sun in a cloudy sky, a curtain with shadows, and a window are juxtaposed and, through special framing, are architecturally doubled, as it were. According to theories from 'Environmental Aesthetics', we can often only aesthetically experience such fundamental sights, which we hardly pay attention to in everyday life, through 'framing'. In the video installation Where the Sun comes up and down each day / The Earth spins (2023), videos of a sunrise and sunset are projected onto four large sheets of paper, each hung in front of the windows on the east and south facades. The blurriness makes it seem as if the projected image is shining through the paper from outside. The recordings are accelerated in such a way that the sun's movement is just visible, confronting us with the fact that we are on a planet that rotates without us being able to feel it. As the title suggests, the exhibition was also about creating different temporalities in the four exhibition rooms. The question of how time is brought to a standstill in artistic works, or how we can even perceive time, has now become very central to my approach. If you look at Friedrich's The Great Enclosure near Dresden, you intuitively know that it is early morning, just before the sun rises above the horizon. It is precisely these moments, in which one can have a heightened perception and immediate experience of the temporal dimension, that I particularly try to create in installed works. Light is an inherent element in all my works and serves as a visualization of the passage of time. In a subtle way, light situations create moods, but for me, they are always also a reference to the sun as a point of reference, allowing us to locate ourselves both temporally and spatially in the world. In the installation I am Nowhere (2023), in a narrow room completely covered with white curtains, the video work Sun Behind White Skies II (2023) is projected onto a white canvas The empty frame/ Window Pane (2023). Here, the canvas becomes a window into various landscape scenes of endless expanse. The video work translates spatial into temporal distance until any sense of space and time is lost. This creates a vacuum of daydream-like states and intuitive contemplation, in which we look at something while our minds are elsewhere. In my experience, Friedrich's painting creates precisely these situations of solitude in active emptiness and, in its openness, becomes a projection surface for our personal horizon of experience.

Where the sun comes up and down each day © Isabell Alexandra Meldner

HC: In your opinion, why is Friedrich's work relevant today?

IM: As I mentioned earlier, I see fundamental, very accessible themes and motifs in Friedrich's work that can intuitively touch us today just as they did then, without needing to be clearly contextualized art-historically within a specific period. It is this kind of timelessness, detached from a particular worldview or cultural memory, that adheres to the works and makes them relevant. Against the backdrop of contemporary art, I find it particularly striking that Friedrich does not create a new world, but depicts 'the world' with an immediacy of experience and so directly shows us how significant the experience of a single sunset can be.