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
Curator: Irmi Horn
Opening remarks by:
LR Dr. Karlheinz Kornhäusl (requested),
Deputy Mayor Mag.a Judith Schwentner (City of Graz),
Art historian Marlies Schöck (Neue Galerie, requested)
Pink—whether soft rose, vibrant fuchsia, or reddish-pink—is a light hue with varying degrees of red and white. Across many European languages, its name derives from the rose. The equivalents are in French: rose, rosé and rosâtre; in Spanish: rosa, rosé, or color de rosa (= color of rose); 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 term for this color is pink, which also refers to the carnation flower.
In German, pink typically refers to bright, saturated tones resembling the shade “shocking pink”—a vivid, bluish pink introduced to fashion by Elsa Schiaparelli in the 20th century. In contrast, English uses pink more broadly, encompassing a wide palette of tones ranging from pale blush to deep magenta.
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), shades like PalePink, LightPink, and MediumPink align more closely with the German concept of rosa, while stronger hues like HotPink or DeepPink align with pink.
The pink color is part of 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.
In her book Wie Farben wirken (1989), German sociologist Eva Heller found that adults commonly associate pink with tenderness, sweetness, romanticism, and femininity. Over 40% of respondents perceived it as “feminine” or “childlike,” while over 30% connected it with naivety or delicacy. Yet historically, pink was not always seen as feminine. Until the early 20th century, pink—viewed as a light form of red—was associated with masculinity, strength, and aristocracy. Boys wore pink; girls wore sky blue, symbolizing innocence. This gender coding began to shift post-World War I with social and industrial changes.
Pink has also carried meanings of optimism and softness. Phrases like “rosy times” or “seeing the world through rose-colored glasses” reflect its dual potential: either hopeful or naively unrealistic.
In Red: The History of a Color, historian Michel Pastoureau traces pink’s use back to the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs, who dyed textiles with brasilin, a pigment from redwood trees. By the 14th century, pink became a luxury color in Europe, gaining prominence in aristocratic fashion, especially under Madame de Pompadour. In the early 20th century, American textile historian Jo Paoletti documented how gendered color-coding reversed: pink shifted from boyhood to girlhood. In fashion, Schiaparelli’s “Shocking Pink” turned the shade into a symbol of avant-garde femininity. Pink also gained political resonance. In the 1970s, LGBTQ activists reclaimed the pink triangle—originally a Nazi symbol used to persecute homosexuals—as a badge of pride. By the 1990s, it was largely replaced by the rainbow flag, but the legacy of pink as resistance remained.
In 2017, during the Women’s March following Donald Trump’s inauguration, thousands of protestors donned “Pussyhats”—pink knit caps symbolizing defiance and solidarity. Activists Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman described pink as representing care, compassion, and strength—qualities too often dismissed as weak. 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.
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 – Paintings
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 followed. From 1999 to 2016 she lived and worked as a freelance artist in Vienna. In 2017, Kathrin Siegl became 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.
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, and over 80 years in the zoo with careful care. In some parts of the world, flamingos were used until the 20th century for their flesh. Their pink shimmering feathers, however, were never coveted. The reason? They lose their color after plucking.
Erwin Schwentner – Sculptures
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.
“Layer by Layer: Pink?” invites viewers to consider pink not as a mere color, but as a shifting symbol—gendered, politicized, aesthetic, biological. From flamingos to feminism, from neon textiles to handcrafted protests, pink emerges as a field of negotiation between the past and the future, between personal identity and collective imagination.