Homi

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and a war in Ukraine, Kunsthalle Osnabrück sets out to explore the question: What’s the current state of our hope and desire for love, identity and belonging? This year’s theme “Romanticism” uses the eponymous art and literature movement as a distorting mirror with which to examine the current state of society. Sweeping across Germany and Europe, hardly any other movement has managed to shape such a strong collective feeling situated between departure, nostalgia and nationalism through aesthetic means. Set against the backdrop that is the museum’s medieval architecture, the Kunsthalle wants to investigate whether the current sense of global turmoil has inspired a comeback of the visual and linguistic worlds of Romanticism. The exhibition programme of the annual theme includes solo exhibitions by the Forum Democratic Culture and Contemporary Art, Anna Haifisch, Gabriella Hirst, Irène Mélix, Cemile Sahin, Andrzej Steinbach, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. Anna Haifisch is a comic artist and illustrator. With a humorous and revealing take on our society, she portrays her protagonists as animals. Haifisch became known for her comic The Artist – a tormented, skinny bird that can be viewed as a mirror of the modern-day struggles artists face under neoliberalism, but also as a reckoning with the arts industry and the ever-present, contradictory idea of art as a creative and higher calling. For the entrance area and cloister of Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Anna Haifisch developed several table sculptures and a new narrative image series in which she lets the Artist explore the city of Osnabrück. In a humorous and self-deprecating manner, the motifs deal with the inner conflict of a small town caught between a sense of security,emptiness and melancholy. The series finds Haifisch interweaving local observations of everyday life with the art-historical motif of the artist in bed. It is a new spin on a romantic image-based genre of telling stories about modern-day escapism, retreats into private domesticity and fear of failure.Time and time again, the artist becomes an observer of a world to which they long to belong but which completely overwhelms them. Besides publishing her own works, Anna Haifisch (DE) regularly draws for newspapers and magazines such as The New Yorker, Frieze, Die Zeit, The Guardian, FAX or Texte zur Kunst. Most recently, her works were shown at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (2022), the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, the Musee du Papier, Angouleme (both in 2020) and in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2019). In 2020, she was commissioned to draw the series Drawn to MoMa by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her most recent publications include the complete edition of The Artist at Reprodukt (2022) and Residenz Fahrenbühl at Spector Books (2021). Her books have already been translated in several languages. She has been awarded, among others, the Max-und-Moritz-Preis as best German-language comic artist (2020) and the LVZ-Kunstpreis (2021).