Kathrin Lorenz, „flamingo love“, Acryl/LW canvas, 80 cm × 80 cm, 2024 Bildausschnitt/section Phoenicopterus roseus
LAYER BY LAYER: PINK? Doris Hansen (Short Residency), Kathrin Lorenz, Erwin Schwentner
Doris Hansen (Short Residency), Kathrin Lorenz, Erwin Schwentner
Curator: Irmi Horn.
Opening: LR Dr. HKarlheinz Kornhäusl – requested, Deputy Mayor Mag.a Judith Schwentner as representative of the city, art historian Marlies Schöck (Neue Galerie) requested.
On the worldview, understanding of history and naive experience.
Pink, pink or pink red is a light, more or less reddish body color, a mixed color of a lot of white and less red.
In many European languages, the name of this color is derived from the rose. The equivalents are in French: rose, rosé and rosâtre; in Spanish: rosa, rosé, or color de rosa (= rose colors); in Portuguese: cor-de-rosa, rosa, rosa, rosé; in Italian: rosa; in Dutch: roze; in Swedish and Norwegian: rosa; in Hungarian: rózsaszín; in Polish: różowy.
The English translation for pink is pink. This is also the name of a flower: the carnation. In German, ‘pink’ usually means only a very strong, luminous and usually bluish tone of medium or dark pink, which roughly corresponds to the shade shocking pink (translated: “bright pink”). 4] This was in the 20th. Century by the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli.[ 5] On the other hand, in English, pink means the entire palette of pink tones from soft pink to bright shocking pink.
Of the color patterns of the “World Wide Web Consortium” (W3C) associated with the name pink, the tones ‘PalePink’, ‘Light Pink’, ‘Pink’ and ‘Medium Pink’ correspond most likely to the German color understanding of ‘Pink’, while the stronger shades ‘Deep Pink’, ‘Hot Pink’, and ‘Dark Pink’ would possibly also be referred to in German as ‘Pink’, although they are sometimes not as blue- or purple-tinged as shocking pink (or ‘magenta’).
The palette of pink tones is a continuum that ranges from an almost white pale pink and soft pink to medium light nuances to dark pink or pink. The small addition of other tones creates further gradations, on the one hand there are cooler and harder blue or purple-stinged pink tones – up to ‘pink’ (see above), mauve and the border to light magenta; on the other hand warmer and softer tones, which have a slight yellow, beige or ochre tint, up to salmon pink, which has a pale-orange tendency. The boundaries to other color ranges are fluid. Old pink is a fine, slightly darker, with little gray (and possibly also brown or beige) broken pink tone.
According to the results of one by Eva Heller – (* 8. April 1948 in Esslingen am Neckar; † 31. January 2008 in Frankfurt am Main) was a German writer and social scientist – in her book Wie Farben wirken (1989), a survey of adult Germans, the color pink was mainly associated with loveliness, softness, tenderness, tenderness and gentleness. For about 38 to 43% of respondents, pink is also sweet, enthusiastic, dreamy, romantic and sensitive. More than 40% also thought the color was typically feminine or childish, and more than 30% associated with the color naivety or smallness. It was also relatively important in the color associations with mildness, charm and politeness.
In fact, pink – “the little red” – was a male color for a long time. Until 1920, pink was considered a miniature edition of the red color of the rulers as a sign of masculinity and strength, which was used for men and boys. Girls, on the other hand, were dressed in sky blue. It was only after the First World War that this perception changed. At that time, the focus was on the reconstruction of the cities, and boys were dressed in practical colors of the “working world”. By the way, the classic Blaumann dates from this time and is the male counterpart to the later Rosa for girls.
The hue is also used in the sense of “optimistic, pleasing, positive”; this interpretation goes back to “rosy” or “pink red”. Phrases with this meaning are “experience rosy times” or “he is not exactly rosy” or “see the future in a rosy light”. A negative increase in this meaning in the sense of “unrealistic, transfiguring” are the expressions “see everything through rose-colored glasses” or “for them the world is pink”.
From Wikipedia and the net.
The Press 24. March 2025: A statement in pink
Pink tones have been fashionably rehabilitated: Now it’s the symbol color
A new generation of feminists.
Associated femininity. Pink is a good example of the identity- and unity-forming effect of colors. The association of pink with femininity, for example, seems to us today as unrefutable and is firmly anchored in our collective consciousness. However, this was not always the sae. A look back into the history of the hue reveals numerous metamorphoses and changes in meaning. In the wonderfully illustrated volume “Red – The History of a Color”, freshly published by Princeton University Press, the French historian and color expert Michel Pastoureau devotes an entire chapter to the color pink. The dye Brasilin obtained from redwood was already used by the Central and South American advanced civilizations of the Inca, Maya and Aztecs as well as in Asia. Only when in the 14th Century Venetian traders with the import of redwood (or also: Brasilholz) from India and Sumatra, Brasilin also spread in the West to the dyeing of textiles. Rosa, then called “incarnato”, was a fashion color in Italy, which was particularly popular with the lords of the aristocracy, and penetrated to the French court. Century, when Madame de Pompadour chose it as her favorite color in addition to sky blue.
Today, exactly these two colors are considered classic baby colors, each assigned to a fixed gender. Here, too, the history of color contains surprising findings: The American textile historian Jo Paoletti has dealt more closely with the sexual coding of pink and light blue and found out that pink was used until the early 20th century. Century was considered the color of the boy, as it was interpreted as light red and therefore associated with strength, power and warlike. Light blue, on the other hand, was attributed to girls, as it was interpreted as graceful and lovely. Between 1910 and 1940, a reversal of this attribution gradually took place, and pink prevailed as a girl’s color. In the fashion of the 20th century. In the 19th century, shades of pink and pink repeatedly appear as trend colors. Elsa Schiaparelli, the flamboyant archrival of Coco Chanel, called her perfume launched in 1937 “Shocking Pink” and declared the color her trademark. Pink in all shades has since become an integral part of the high fashion color palette and is especially indispensable in the evening wear division, which is why the latest pink renaissance is actually not surprising in fashion.
Much more interesting, on the other hand, is the instrumentalization of the color pink for progressive activism. A first politically motivated appropriation of the color pink took place in the 1970s by the gay and lesbian movement. During the Third Reich, homosexual men were criminalized and persecuted, in the concentration camps they were branded with a pink corner of fabric (at the exhibition “Sex in Vienna” in the Vienna Museum a rare original was found among the exhibits). In memory of the gay victims of National Socialism, in the early 1970s, homosexual activists in the USA and Europe began to attach a pink corner, which also contributed to the formation of collective identity and to the strengthening of political consciousness as sexually oppressed. It was not until the 1990s that the pink angle was replaced by the rainbow flag as the preferred symbol of the LGBTQ movement.
Pink politics. Today, a feminist politicization of Pink takes place in protest rooms off- and online. On the last 21. January, the day after the American President Donald Trump took office, hundreds of thousands of women protested at a large demonstration in Washington, D.C. against Trump’s right-wing populist policies, and also in other American cities and around the world Trump opponents mobilized for protest marches. Many of the demonstrators wore “Pussyhats”, pink knitted hats with cat ears, on the initiative of the two activists Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, who launched the “Pussyhat Project” since the election results became known in November. The caps represent the protest alternative to the red baseball caps with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, but are also a reaction to the relevant sexist and misogynistic statements of the president revealed during the election campaign. Suh and Zweiman spread knitting, crochet and sewing instructions for the Pussyhats on the net and thus linked to the tradition of “Craftivism”, in which manual work is understood as subversive political work.
In the accompanying text to the DIY tutorial, Suh and Zweiman write about the symbolic meaning of the color pink: “Pink is seen as a female color that represents care, compassion and love – all qualities that are ridiculed, but in reality stand for strength. Wearing pink together is an effective statement that we are unambiguously female and uncompromisingly stand up for women’s rights. Today, pink has become the symbolic color of a new generation of feminists who advocate for the enhancement of negatively connoted characteristics attributed to women and against chauvinistic gender stereotypes.
The swaying of the viewer – Doris Hansen’s microworlds
Microworlds form the meta-idea of all concepts and realizations of the Berlin-based artist Doris Hansen. They give them a shape in the form of installation, relief, object or as a drawing; they are extraterrestrial visions of our future.
The realizations consist of materials that are as foreign as possible, such as Styrofoam, which is invisibly hidden by synthetic textiles like a room skeleton. In recent years, the artist has expanded the microworlds with scans of her pencil drawings, which she colors digitally, as well as large-format reliefs. In the current projects, Doris Hansen combines her typical soft materials, which have a strong feel, with optical components: she is increasingly experimenting with LED lights that spread changing artificial light, or with worlds that are built in a plexiglass shell and appear like hemispheres in miniature. Especially the transparency of these object membranes or that of the shop windows, in which Doris Hansen regularly exhibits her installations, emphasize the difference between this other room and ours. The view of the viewer through these membranes fits only too well with the idea of a space that will never fully open up to us, because it escapes our imagination and leads us back to the concrete materiality of the works.
Doris Hansen draws inspiration from microbiology, from medieval worldviews and above all from comics and science fiction of the 1950s to the 1970s. This is how the microworlds also read as fictional worlds: We share the view of Flash Gordon or Barbarella, who was directed at the now many decades ago and over whose visions we can smile today, because everything turned out so differently. However, they are also – and perhaps above all – perfect worlds that do not want to reveal their manual manufacturing process, even disguise them, as if they were not manufactured in elaborate manual work, but themselves industrially and mechanically.
Doris Hansen creates multicolored, attractive, queer worlds, in which she brings about a deconstruction of the binary sexes via material and production technology: The building material Styropor attributed to masculinity is literally superimposed by feminine colors, textiles and floral motifs, the ideas of male/female, homo/hetero are deconstructed as cultural and historical assignments: tertium datur. In the microworlds the inhabitants of FIMO have no gender.
At the level of the signs, the microworlds are contradictory to receive. So the viewer feels attracted by their incredible material presence, but at the same time his thoughts collide again and again with the utopias to which the microworlds refer. There is an uncertain balance that, the longer we expose ourselves to the worlds, it falters and triggers discomfort in us despite – or precisely because of – the enormous aesthetics of the artificial. Because what do these worlds refer to? They always refer back to us and show us an empty place of our imagination, our future. Sarah Niesel (art historian)
Doris Hansen comes from Bad Oldesloe /Schleswig Holstein (1972). From 1992 to 2001 she studied German philology and art history in Trier and Berlin and completed her studies as Magistra Artium in 2001.
2001-2003 she was club operator and event manager (GLAM, Invalidenstrasse and Schillingstrasse), since 2003 she lives as a freelance artist in Berlin.
Kathrin Lorenz was born in Fürstenfeld, Styria, studied Fine Arts and Painting:
1999 University of Arts Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA,
1999 University of Applied Arts Vienna, Prof. Christian Ludwig Attersee
In 2005 she graduated with distinction. From then on, numerous exhibitions follow.
From 1999 to 2016 she lived and worked as a freelance artist in Vienna.
In 2017, Kathrin Siegl will become Kathrin Lorenz.
Since 2016 she has been living and working as a freelance artist in Styria, Am Hohenberg, Schöckl and is the mother of two daughters.
Their stays abroad led them to Iceland, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dublin, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Stockholm, Prague, Debrecen, Umbria, Pennsylvania, Belgium, Croatia, Slovenia, southern France, Tuscany and Switzerland (Geneva, Bern).
She combines knowledge and imagination in her work and wants to change the viewing angle and create the possibility of new approaches in her typical lavious use of color and brush stroke for viewers.
The flamingos have impressed her for years.
When flamingos hatch, they have a gray fluff. It takes years for her plumage to stain. Only at a more mature age do they become pink or pink. And the reason for this is their food. The menu of wild flamingos includes algae of the genus Dunaliella and small crabs. Some, like the others, contain very specific color pigments: carotenoids.
Certain microbes that color water red because they are rich in carotenoids, such as the “salt bacterium”, scientifically called Halobacterium salinarum, is at the beginning of the food chain. The small crabs feed on the tiny organisms that are at home in a highly salty environment, which are then eaten by the flamingos. Flamingoes can live to be 20 to 30 years old in the wild, in the zoo even over 80 with good care. In some parts of the world, flamingos were used until the 20th century. Century because of their flesh. Her pink shimmering feathers, however, were never coveted. The reason? They lose their color after plucking.
With his sculpture, Erwin Schwentner tries to comment on the so-called great themes of humanity and uses his own sculptural world, which means – always coming from his head – the “whole world”. Apart from this world there is none for him, so the attempts at explanation necessarily remain imperfect. Layer by layer, he uncovers human behavior in a humorous and critical way.
Schwentner was born in 1945 in Hitzendorf near Graz, he is married, has 3 children, was a judge, and has been active in artistic activity since 1980.
Since 1982 exhibitions and exhibition participations in Germany and abroad.
Schwentner was born in 1945 in Hitzendorf near Graz, he is married, has 3 children, was a judge, and has been active in artistic activity since 1980.
Since 1982 exhibitions and exhibition participations in Germany and abroad.