DIRECTORY 2024

Nicola Barth | Painting

Nicola Barth, born in Mölln in 1966, now lives and works near Frankfurt am Main. She completed her master's degree in German Studies at the JW Goethe University in Frankfurt. 

She always wanted to write books but soon put down the pen and picked up a paintbrush to find new forms of expression. Words were no longer enough to describe what she was dealing with: permanent metamorphic processes in non-obvious areas. "Non-representational painting is now my language without words. That makes sense to me, because I "report" from worlds and expanses in which languages are spoken that we don't (know). My gaze is always focused on what lies behind, beneath, and above, in worlds of experience that are not obvious. So my language must also lead from the depths of the experience of being, another, more open form of communication that is grasped with other senses, a language that is impression and expression and frequency, without naming, evaluating, classifying." In addition to transformation and change of form, her work is about language and space, accompanied by questions about identity,  alienation, and defragmentation of the individual and their localization in space and time.

nicola-barth.com

@nicola.barth

The leitmotif of Nicola Barth's work is transformation. Her endeavor to represent the indeterminable, the changeable in form, shape, and space also extends to the search for the appropriate language. In doing so, she does not focus on reality, but always on a behind and in-between and tries to capture fleeting, barely comprehensible snapshots of development processes.

This frequency is the birthplace of Nicola Barth's Morpheus Mosquitos series. The alpha state lies between fully awake and drowsy. The advantage of the alpha state is that one is awake but simultaneously has access to all the information in the subconscious. It is the starting point for any contact with the creative, the divine, the higher self. Alpha is the gateway to creativity, problem-solving, and healing. Dreams always play an essential role in creation. In many cultures, the creation of the world is linked to dreams. The best creative ideas are often not conceived but dreamed.

Morpheus Mosquitos are, therefore, also small flying "sparks of creativity" that accompany us through the day and bite us when we are "on air in off-space", i.e., in a state of flow.

Morpheus is the god of sleep and dreams and gave his name to the Morpheus mosquitoes, "dream mosquitoes." The mosquitoes, quick, cheeky in their nature, bite, itch, and suck the blood out of our skin. They get under your skin, they get to your substance, they are haunting, they remind you and wake you up.

Enigmatic, mysterious, fragmented, erratic, strange, peculiar, mysterious, surreal, fantastic - that's how dream thoughts can be. Whether Barth's Morpheus Mosquitos are, others will have to judge.