Ellen GRONEMEYER was born in 1979 in Germany. She graduated from Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in 2005, and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She has taught at the Chelsea College of Arts and Design in London, and has been appointed the Junior Professor of Painting at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf since 2017. Gronemeyer's fictional images are intertwined with the contradictions of imagination and reality, resulting in scenes of humor mixed with the grotesque. The corrosive yet seemingly multiplying shades of gray, thick textures, and interlacing details in her works are compounded into a vibrant and shimmering visual density, with an ambiguous sense of radiance that comes from the artist's unique use of color and technique—on the base of black, white, and gray, she starts with layers of bright colors, and gradually covers with a darkening of the layers. Gronemeyer combines comic distortion with the ordinary in a deceptively illogical world, transforming whimsical images into the protagonists open to the possibilities of her inner world. Wandering across fantasy and reality, and between naiveté and sophistication, she creates her distinctive style of imagery that resonates with French Fauvist and Expressionist gestures.
Ellen Gronemeyer‘s work has been exhibited in several international galleries and major institutions, including Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg), Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst (Aachen), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Sammlung Falkenberg (Hamburg), musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (Bordeaux). Her work is held in notable collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern and Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
