About the artists:

Nidhi Agarwal’s (born in New Delhi in 1972) vibrant gouache drawings on handmade paper are dream worlds full of grotesque, post-surrealistic beings. The handmade paper, already restless as a material, swarms with cephalopods, or eye-only- or nose-only-footed creatures intertwined with geometric bodies or graphic structures. Sometimes they fight or communicate, sometimes they simply co-exist as representations of current existential struggles and conditions – they act just as an “Outlandish Crew”.

Rupert Eder‘s (born in Bad Aibling, Germany, in 1968) painting means an immediate and intensive examination of abstract, overlapping color structures. The translucent layers of watercolour reveal the structure of the handmade Indian rag paper in this small scale watercolour series. His work is non-objective and thus a surface of free perception. At the same time, they draw the viewer into a seemingly endless spatial world. At the same time, through the nesting of the formal levels the viewer is drawn into a seemingly infinite spatial world.

Despoina Pagiota (born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1994) in her process of re-appropriation uses pieces of de-collaged poster fragments from the urban area around her studio and dyed denim fabric as a starting point. Striking tear marks of the paper, its back structure, specific printing grids or pieces of gesso freckled cardboard together with the fraying structure of the fabric speak out of the painterly collage compositions arranged in a minimalist way.

Renata Palekcic’s (born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1973) genuine working material for serial drawings, amorphous sculptures and installations is paper. Here she crumpled very thin and light black flower silk sheets in order to unfold and to stack them to a light pile. It is a process of violently injuring the paper and right after giving it a new vitality in a vivid shape turning the thin black sheets into a poetically allusive sculpture.

Christian F. Kintz (born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1968) deals exclusively with form, color and material. In the shown series he played with the boundaries of watercolor techniques. It was produced on site during his artist residency at Onkaf Gallery in 2019. Christian appropriates the material of the watercolor in an unorthodox way. He mixes it with acrylic colour and Indian gulal powder for a heretical way of painting on paper that has little to do with the traditionally desired watercolor qualities. The paper bends and bends, groaning under the thick, drying paint, finally coming to life in a relief structure.

Sylvia Schultes (born in Kiel, Germany) in her oil, acrylic and watercolor is entirely concerned with patterns. The repetition and entanglement of structures and ornaments filling the picture mark the concentrated freehand process of production, the picture surface and its spatial limitation itself. In the new “Nœud” series, long strips of strong drawing paper painted with ink become precious-looking spheres in space by being entwined and knotted. Also in Sylvia’s work, similar to Renata’s, a destructive process accepting torn edges and broken paper fibres leads to a powerful rising in a new shape.

Ruchika Wason Singh (born in Delhi in 1974) in her „Relic” series continues a work that started in the first PAPER JAM show in 2020 with relics surfaced as painted and collaged forms on Japanese Shikishi paper. “The relic is the remnant which is left behind, unwanted items which were once a part of our lives, now re-constructing the landscape around us. It is also a symbol of desires and what lies between our wants and needs.” In PAPER JAM II Ruchika developed this subject matter further and worked upon it by using paper as a material rather than a surface, including paper pulp, papier maché and found materials. Each sheet is a space or a site for the relic to be reimagined within, to be embedded, fossilized. The “Relic” series is an abstract representation of human consumption.