My belief in the sun, moon, and stars became incredibly lovely. Without it and Venice, maybe I would be ruined because people wouldn’t understand me. I was a bad student and a detestable kid.

—— Theodor Däubler (Das Nordlicht/The Northern Lights)

LINSEED is thrilled to present Ellen Gronemeyer’s (b.1979, Germany) first solo show in Asia, Forty Winks, from September 22 to November 1, 2023. Gronemeyer was born in the late 70s in West Germany and has witnessed the sociocultural transformation of the nation, the world, and the people. Though crowded with distorted facial features and eyes blinking on the murky canvas, Gronemeyer’s playground is not an ecstatic masked ball opposite to reality with extreme revelry. The childlike figures, as well as anthropomorphic plants and creatures, gesture towards an imagined world in a nap, or “forty winks", which for the artist is “a very specific kind of sleep when you are still connected with day-to-day life.” At its core, Gronemeyer explores a kaleidoscope of emotions that spontaneously and unreservedly manifest in this liminal state. If the real is measured by the intensity of feelings, Gronemeyer's picture plane no longer seems to represent the end of the canvas.

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