MIRIAM TÖLKE

Miriam Toelke studied painting at the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. She lives and works in Berlin with her family.

The artist assembles images from magazines with found objects, scraps of paper or fragments from her accumulated picture archive. In this analogue process, she collects, explores and observes, placing her findings in a new context with striking, minimalist verve. Thus glossy pictures combined with landscape images become bizarre and irritating portraits that seem to reflect an inner world, creating a spiritual landscape, indicative of both the artist’s poetic way of thinking as well as today’s zeitgeist. In her pictures, there is always an element of calm, of pausing, which is initially unsettling, before unfolding its profound effect and finally eliciting a smile.

Artist statement:

"I take everything out of context, collect, rearrange, put together loose parts, mixing materials and techniques. I create my own order out of the chaos of abundance. I am a flaneur. That’s why I live in the city mostly. I love to study people, faces, gestures, movements. Nature gives me horizon. Be naive in everything you do. The pictures are there - listen."

Mirjam Tölke, 2019

Take a look at the one-minute video: Click here for the video

Exhibitions:

• 2021: Art Rotterdam 2021, Gallery Bildhalle (NL)

• 2021: Collage Assemblage Group Exhibition, Kulturelles Centrum Templin (DE)

• 2021: Behind Desire Group Exhibition, Chaussee 36 Berlin, Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz, Arles (FR)

• 2021: Collage Group Exhibition, Gallery Stieglitz Antwerpen (BE)

• 2020: Paper Positions. Berlin (DE)

• 2019: Seaside, Galerie Bildhalle, Zurich (CH)

• 2006: Brachmanns Galeron, Hamburg (DE)

• 2005: CCA Artists in Residence, Mallorca (ES)

• 2005: Hemmungen, CCA Andratx, Mallorca (ES)